Investing in Research Done Differently®
When a major research institute issues a call for funding applications, it expects that many of the nation’s top scientists will respond with proposals for a range of important studies designed to answer critical questions and advance the state of knowledge in their field.
At PCORI, we have similar expectations following the May 22 release of our first funding announcements outlining the primary research we were created to support. But we also are looking for much more. We’re hoping our call for proposals will launch nothing less than a new era in health and healthcare research.
Our funding announcements, involving up to $96 million in awards this year, are different than many solicitations for research proposals. We hope the investigators we fund will include a broader cross-section of Americans than most research programs. We hope we’ll see patients and other stakeholders coming together with researchers to form teams that have not worked together before.
Our agenda is designed to support rigorous research that addresses practical, everyday questions faced by patients and other stakeholders. We want the projects we support to consider the outcomes that matter to patients and have a high likelihood of being implemented because patients, caregivers and decision-makers were involved in the process.
Our announcements are based on PCORI’s National Priorities for Research and mark the beginning of the implementation of our Research Agenda. There are four announcements so far, one for each of our first four priorities:
We’ll issue a call for proposals in our fifth priority area -- accelerating patient-centered outcomes research and methodological research -- during the summer. We view these four areas as closely related to each other. We need to generate new knowledge in each if patients are to have a better chance of making and sticking with health and health care decisions most likely to lead to the outcomes that they prefer.
These funding announcements don’t place limits on the conditions or treatments that can be proposed for study. We are confident that patients, clinicians, and researchers across the country will have an abundance of questions worth studying for PCORI to consider.
We are also confident that research funding has never before been so clearly dedicated to answering the questions that matter most to patients and their caregivers. Applications will be reviewed by patients and other stakeholders, as well as by top scientists. We will work hard to ensure that all reviewers appreciate this difference in how funding decisions are to be made and will select those proposals that most clearly meet PCORI’s criteria for patient-centered research.
The announcements will fund sizeable initiatives – up to $500,000 per year for up to three years – but we’re particularly interested in projects that can be completed sooner. Projects that take advantage of existing data or that build on studies already under way are of great interest to us, especially if they can deliver important results quickly.
We hope you will take this opportunity to join the PCORI community as a member of a research team or as a reviewer. We’ve tried hard to make our application process simpler than most, but we also want to make it clear that solid research methods are extremely important to us. We will not fund research that fails to follow best methodological practice every step of the way.
If you are considering applying, keep your eye on this web site. We have a number of initiatives planned to help you. We’ve just posted a preliminary version of PCORI’s Draft Methodology Report, which describes good research practices in detail as a resource for applicants. We also have scheduled a series of webinars to walk you through our mandatory Letter of Intent and application processes.
As always, we welcome your questions or suggestions on our funding announcements (or anything else we do). We might make minor changes to the announcements or application guidelines from time to time, based on your feedback or other refinements we find needed along the way. We will post such updates clearly so that you can always be sure you’re using the latest version of the application.
Whether you are a researcher, patient, caregiver, a clinician or health system leader (or all of the above), we sincerely hope that you will explore these announcements and consider forming a team to apply for research funding. It is your contributions and your passion that will help us truly support “Revise to Research Done Differently®.”