Matchmaker, Matchmaker – the PCORI Challenge Initiative

At PCORI, our mandate is to support research that will help patients and those who care for them make better-informed health and health care decisions. To meet this goal, we’ve has made it clear that we plan to support “research done differently,” requiring, among other things, that the projects funded provide mechanisms for meaningful involvement of patients and caregivers throughout the research process.

But how might researchers who are committed to engaging in such collaborative work connect with potential patient or caregiver partners? And how might patients or caregivers interested in working with researchers, or who have research ideas they’d like to see turned into a rigorous scientific study, connect with the investigators who can help to make that a reality?

We think these questions add up to an excellent opportunity for PCORI’s first “challenge” initiative – using an “open innovation” approach to problem-solving to tap into the expertise of our stakeholder communities. We’ve just announced the broad outline of our inaugural challenge – developing a patient/research “matchmaking” system that will effectively connect potential partners interested in seeking funding from us for rigorous patient-centered outcomes research.

The solution could be a well-articulated conceptual model, a prototype of a web-based service, a mobile app, some combination of these approaches, or something else entirely. We think this will be a compelling challenge that will resonate with researchers, patients, the caregiver and advocacy communities, developers and entrepreneurs. Judging the entries we receive for this challenge will be a panel of reviewers that will include researchers, technologists, patients and other stakeholders.

Winners will receive cash prizes and their work may be considered for additional PCORI support, depending on the outcome of the review process. We recently announced this challenge at the just-concluded Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco. We’ll be working in the next few weeks to finalize the details and prepare for our formal launch. To stay up to date on the latest news about this challenge and all of our work, be sure to subscribe to our e-mail alerts.