Our First Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Awards Funding Announcement

At PCORI’s first Board of Governors meeting in November 2010, newly appointed Chair Eugene Washington, MD, MSc, led the first substantive discussion of the Board’s vision for PCORI. It was not a debate about research methods, high-priority research topics, or funding mechanisms, though all are critical issues. The conversation was about engaging the entire healthcare community in PCORI’s work.

That discussion was at the core of PCORI’s commitment to “research done differently”—engaging a broad range of healthcare stakeholders in guiding the patient-centered comparative effectiveness research (CER) we were created to support. In the years since, we’ve tried to make good every day on our commitment to include patients, caregivers, clinicians, payers, and a host of others across the healthcare community in our work. We do this out of a core belief that such engagement can lead to better, more useful research more likely to be taken up in practice and improve outcomes.

Today, we take the latest step on that path with the launch of the Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Awards, which aim to support more active integration of patient, research, and other stakeholder communities in the patient-centered outcomes research process. We thought it especially fitting to name these awards in honor of the man who, although he stepped down as Board chair last fall, continues to have an impact on everything we do.

The Engagement Awards are organized into Knowledge, Training and Development, and Dissemination and Implementation Awards

The PCORI Engagement Awards Investment

PCORI is committing more than $15 million in 2014 to the Engagement Awards, which are organized into three funding categories: Knowledge Awards, Training and Development Awards, and Dissemination and Implementation Awards. Each is designed to accomplish a specific objective that will lead to the institute’s vision for patient-centered research.

Knowledge Awards will invest $5 million to build knowledge around how consumers of healthcare information receive and make use of patient-centered outcomes research findings. Funding will go towards projects with a variety of goals including developing an understanding of how patients and caregivers access healthcare information to make decisions, where they get their information, and what types of research would be most valuable to our key patient and stakeholder groups.

Training and Development Awards will fund up to $8 million in projects designed to promote training and development of the “non-usual suspects” from the patient and stakeholder community to increase their capacity for engaging in research. These projects may include identification of strategies to train and prepare stakeholders with little experience in research to engage as partners in the conduct of patient-centered outcomes research or to develop mechanisms to match patients and researchers to collaborate in all phases of the research process.

As an example, last year, we piloted a program under this category called the Pipeline to Proposals. These awards committed over $400,000 to enhance knowledge of the research process, provide community groups with training in partnership development, and aid selected stakeholder groups in devising research proposals.

Finally, Dissemination Awards will support up to $2 million in activities that lay the groundwork for disseminating and implementing the findings of PCORI-funded research projects in practice. These awards will be given to projects that identify promising practices in dissemination and implementation and help PCORI build infrastructure for outreach to the patient, caregiver, and stakeholder communities.

The Selection Process
We are excited to open the application system today and begin accepting your ideas for Engagement Awards. Inquiries can be submitted by any organization, including private or public research organizations, such as a university or college, hospital, or healthcare system. Individuals are not eligible for funding.

Letters of Inquiry (LOI) are being accepted on a rolling basis. Within 45 days of an LOI submission, PCORI will inform applicants whether they are invited to submit a full application. The full application will be due within 60 days of an invitation.

Proposals will be evaluated on several criteria, the most important being how the application fits within the funding announcement’s goal and within PCORI’s strategic priorities and mission. The practicality of the applicant’s project plan and timeline and the qualifications of the project lead are also important metrics for judging proposals.

The Vision for Engagement

Including patients, caregivers, clinicians, and other healthcare stakeholders in the research process remains our strongest tool for ensuring that the research we fund is focused on practical questions that matter to patients and other clinical care decision makers.

This approach to research supports transparency, which leads to research results that are more likely to be trusted, shared, and used within the healthcare community. The awards will enhance our growing research portfolio by providing “wrap-around” support and accelerating the impact of PCORI’s major research awards. More than that, these new engagement awards are another step forward on a long journey, which began at our first Board meeting, toward a more inclusive and effective research enterprise.

Beal served as PCORI’s Deputy Executive Director and Chief Officer for Engagement from November 2011 – March 2014
Gonzales is Chief of Staff for Engagement