A Look at What's New in PCORI's Merit Review Program
Merit review is an integral part of PCORI’s mission to help patients, caregivers, and other healthcare stakeholders make informed healthcare decisions, and to improve healthcare delivery and outcomes. Our review process ensures that proposed applications are appropriately evaluated against our merit review criteria, so that we fund research that will generate the best possible evidence.
To better communicate the steps involved in this critical process, we recently updated our Merit Review webpages to increase user engagement and interaction. In this spirit, we redesigned our website with our audience—you—in mind.
Changes to our webpages include new design layouts, modified and updated figures, reviewer and mentor testimonial videos, and a more streamlined organization.
On our new homepage, you will be able to easily identify and navigate to our different merit review content pages, which detail our process, criteria, reviewer FAQs, general resources, and a section where you can meet our merit reviewers.
Meet Our Merit Reviewers
The patient, stakeholder, and scientist merit reviewers who dedicate their time, expertise, and experience to review applications for PCORI funding are at the heart of the merit review process. Thanks to their input, PCORI makes research more patient centered, one application at a time while ensuring that every application undergoes thorough and unbiased evaluation. To watch testimonials from reviewers, check out their videos on the updated Meet Our Merit Reviewers page.
The merit review mentor program provides patient and stakeholder merit reviewers the support needed to participate successfully in PCORI Merit Review through personalized, experiential support.
Merit Review Mentor Program
Nested in the Meet Our Merit Reviewers page, you’ll find our new page dedicated to veteran merit reviewers who serve as mentors for new reviewers. The merit review mentor program provides patient and stakeholder merit reviewers the support needed to participate successfully in PCORI Merit Review through personalized, experiential support. Our mentors represent a range of patient and stakeholder communities, including patients, caregivers, family members, patient advocates, clinicians, researchers, purchasers, payers, policy makers, and more. This mentor program page features programmatic information and video testimonials from a few of our most experienced mentors detailing a unique facet of PCORI’s merit review process.
Merit Review Process Page
This is a great place to learn more about merit review, with a detailed look at each step in the process.
What’s New:
The Funding Cycle Wheel
If you have visited our site or have served as a reviewer on one of our panels, you are likely familiar with our merit review wheel. We recently refreshed the wheel and renamed it PCORI Funding Cycle to better reflect its contents.
You can interact at your own pace with the video feature of the wheel to learn more about the merit review process and other steps of the funding cycle, or you can continue scrolling down this webpage to read each step in more detail.
Detailed Merit Review Process
The PCORI Merit Review process is designed to:
- Identify applications that have the strongest potential to help patients, caregivers, clinicians, policy makers, and other healthcare system stakeholders make informed decisions to improve patient outcomes
- Implement a transparent, fair, objective, and consistent process to identify these applications
- Elicit high-quality feedback that reflects a diversity of perspectives to ensure that the PCORI-funded research reflects the interests and views of patients and other stakeholders and those who care for them, and that it meets the criteria for scientific rigor.
To accomplish these goals, detailed steps must be carried out, particularly during the full application receipt, preliminary online review, and in-person review. By reviewing the information in the boxes, you will learn more about what goes into completing each of these steps.
Visit the Merit Review section of PCORI's website to learn about the processes and view reviewer testimonials, FAQs, and other useful materials.
Merit Review Criteria Page
What’s New:
To ensure that merit review criteria are easy to understand, we redesigned this page to organize our criteria by PCORI Funding Announcement (PFA). By clicking on each PFA’s box, you’re able to examine the criteria in greater detail. You are also able to directly access the respective PFA from each Merit Review Criteria page.
Applications that are submitted to PCORI for funding are evaluated against six merit review criteria. These criteria help reviewers determine which applications have the greatest potential to provide evidence that will help patients and other stakeholders make informed healthcare decisions.
Streamlining the content on our Merit Review webpage is one way we hope to increase engagement and transparency surrounding our review process. As we continue to improve our website, stay tuned for future blogs to make sure you are up-to-date with what’s new in merit review. We welcome comments below on how we can continue to improve our process.