Annual Meeting to Illustrate How PCORI Is Making a Difference

We’re just days away from our fifth Annual Meeting here in Washington, DC. If history is any judge, it’s no exaggeration to say that this will be our best yet—they just keep getting better. This year’s theme, Making a Difference: Using Patient-Centered Research Results in the Real World, reflects the reality that the findings from many PCORI projects are now finding their way into practice, improving decision making and changing practice. That’s our mission. You’ll hear about some three dozen of these projects at this year’s meeting.

We’ve also sharply ramped up our efforts to advance the spread and use of the findings from many of our completed projects through our Dissemination and Implementation program. Meeting attendees will hear about a half dozen examples of these initiatives.

In addition, we’ll be sharing the exciting initial results of our ongoing efforts to document the impact of engagement on how the studies we fund are designed and conducted to ensure that they answer questions important to patients and produce results that are relevant and useful in daily practice.

One more exciting note about this year’s meeting. We’ve asked all our awardees who are presenting study findings to invite a patient or other stakeholder partner to join them on stage to discuss their work. I’m pleased to say that many such co-presenters will be with us.

All of this adds up to a rich program featuring two keynote addresses, four plenary sessions and 15 breakouts, as well as 90 posters summarizing even more studies and other projects overseen by our Science, Research Infrastructure (PCORnet), and Engagement teams. We also have a couple of fun opportunities planned—a Wikipedia edit-a-thon and an opportunity to share your experience living with a health condition or caring for someone else who is via the MyPaTH Story Booth.

That’s the kind of rich and unique experience you’ve come to expect from our Annual Meeting, which brings together a diverse range of the stakeholders we serve—something not seen at meetings held by other major research organizations. It’s just a reflection of the unique approach to research that PCORI has pursued since our earliest days—an approach that has led to a $2.4 billion portfolio of more than 700 research and related projects advancing patient-centered outcomes research. More than 200 of those studies have been completed, generating dozens of summaries of peer-reviewed results reported on our website and scores of reports in leading medical journals.

We’re pleased that this work is addressing some of the fundamental challenges facing patients, their families, and the healthcare system. These include such critical issues as knowing which treatments advised by a patient’s doctor—from surgery for spinal fractures to opioids for chronic pain—have evidence proving their effectiveness and safety. As a recent New York Times blog post noted, these are among the questions that are on the minds of all healthcare stakeholders these days, even as we continue to make progress in practicing evidence-based medicine.

Many of the presentations at our Annual Meeting speak directly to the question of how to put new evidence into practice. Check out the complete meeting program on the PCORI Annual Meeting website and join the conversation online by using the hashtag #PCORI2019. If you will be joining us, we look forward to seeing you.