PCORI Celebrates National Women’s Health Week
Women most often are the healthcare decision-makers in our families. We are responsible for choosing doctors, making sure our children and spouses get to their appointments, and ensuring our loved ones get the care they need. We research and we network, and we serve as patient navigators and advocates.
Our questions about health care are informed by our role as decision-makers and caregivers and our personal healthcare needs are distinct. Compared with men, women are affected differently or disproportionately by many health issues, including autoimmune diseases, mental health conditions and osteoporosis. In addition, we face unique reproductive health issues throughout our lives.
For many of the questions we have and the clinical decisions we face, reliable, evidence-based information often is not available to help us make critical health and health care choices.
PCORI was established to help bridge this gap – to fund comparative effectiveness research (CER) that addresses questions for which patients don’t have the answers they need, so they and those who care for them can make better-informed health and healthcare decisions.
National Women’s Health Week, which we celebrate May 12-18, is an opportunity to reflect on how our research already is addressing the needs of women, one of our priority populations.
In our first three rounds of research funding – our Pilot Projects and the first two cycles of our primary research awards – we have approved dozens of proposals to study conditions and issues that have a tremendous impact on women.
For example, one recently funded project will test methods for reducing depression and increasing cancer screenings among women in Bronx County, N.Y., one of the poorest urban counties in the country. Depression affects one in four minority women and studies suggest that women who are depressed are less likely to be screened for cancer. By establishing effective interventions that address this important obstacle to cancer screening, we can help women detect cancer earlier and greatly improve their chance of survival.
Other recently approved projects focus on health issues that affect women exclusively. The awards we announced May 7 include one study that will examine patient-centered outcomes of treatments for uterine fibroids, which affect roughly half of all American women. Another project seeks to create a decision aid to help patients and their caregivers make choices about treatment options for ovarian cancer, which has the highest fatality-to-case ratio of all gynecologic cancers diagnosed in the United States.
A handful of our research projects address women’s unique healthcare needs as caregivers. Among them is a pilot project that studies how we can better incorporate parents’ perspectives into decisions about their children’s vaccinations, especially regarding the most common parental concern that children receive too many vaccines in one doctor's visit. Another project approved during our first round of primary research awards could better inform the decisions parents must make about which epilepsy medications might be most appropriate for their children.
We are pleased to join the country in observing National Women’s Health Week. We’re committed to supporting the patient-centered CER that will produce the reliable evidence needed to help women make better-informed decisions about the health and healthcare issues that affect them and their families. Of course, that same commitment drives all of the work we do, regardless of patient population affected.
We invite everyone to Get Involved in our work by suggesting research questions, serving as a reviewer of the research applications we receive, or by participating in one of our workshops or event. And we invite researchers to submit their proposals to address women’s health issues – and any other critical CER questions – through the many Funding Opportunities listed on our website.
Have other ideas? Send them to me directly at abeal@pcori.org.
Beal served as PCORI’s Deputy Executive Director and Chief Officer for Engagement from November 2011 – March 2014