PCORI's Latest Funding Cycle: What Our New Awards Say About the Research Community -- And Us
There’s good news about PCORI’s latest funding awards. And then there’s even better news. The good news: the 71 awards we approved on September 10, totaling $114.2 million, constitute our largest funding cycle to date. We’re confident that the substantial investments we’re making in patient-centered comparative effectiveness research (CER) will produce volumes of reliable information that patients and those who care for them can use to make better-informed health decisions.
Here’s the better news: we are seeing signs in this latest funding cycle that the scientific community has been able to adapt its approaches to research to meet our unique review criteria, especially for patient-centeredness and patient/stakeholder engagement. We believe these requirements are critical to making research more relevant and useful to patients, their caregivers and clinicians.
After our initial funding rounds, we pledged to focus on communicating with researchers to ensure they have a better understanding of how we evaluate proposals. This cycle, our third under the first four of our National Priorities for Research and Research Agenda, we funded 12.7 percent of all eligible applications for funding. That’s our highest rate yet. Moreover, twenty-two of the funded projects were resubmissions from a previous cycle. In fact, 29 percent of resubmitted applications were funded. This suggests that the feedback our reviewers and science staff provide to applicants have been useful and that applicants are responding.
Funding Across Priority Areas
The highest number (24) of funded proposals in this latest round came under our first research priority, Assessment of Prevention, Diagnosis, and Treatment Options. That’s consistent with the allocations within our research priorities budget, which provides the largest share to this area. In our other priority areas, we funded 13 projects under Improving Healthcare Systems, nine in Addressing Disparities, and six in Communication and Dissemination Research.
The awards our Board of Governors approved also included the inaugural round of funding under our fifth priority area, Accelerating Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) and Methodological Research. These 19 projects will develop or refine methods to guide the conduct of PCOR. Projects cover methods that include causal inference and patient engagement, with the highest number addressing methods for using patient-centered and patient-reported outcomes.
Conditions and Populations Studied
Although many aspects of our funding cycles continue to evolve, the conditions being studied most often in approved proposals have been consistent: Cancers, mental illnesses, and cardiovascular disease. This funding pattern reflects the heavy burden these conditions place on patients and the many unanswered clinical questions surrounding them—and it is consistent with our legislative mandate to take into account “disease incidence, prevalence, and burden” when prioritizing topics to study.
Our authorizing legislation also asks us to place an emphasis on certain populations, including patients with chronic conditions. This category of patients was the topic of 31 proposals funded in Cycle III, ranking only behind the number of proposals that focus on racial/ethnic minorities (36) or people of low socioeconomic status (37). Many of our funded projects study multiple populations.
What We’ve Learned
Each of our funding cycles tells us something new about our progress toward building a portfolio of research projects that helps patients and those who care for them make better health decisions.
Our first funding cycle yielded nearly 500 proposals, demonstrating the widely recognized need for quality comparative effectiveness research. With our second cycle, we doubled the size of our funded research portfolio, proving our capacity to identify and support large numbers of high-quality projects.
The lesson we take from our third cycle is that the scientific community is becoming increasingly fluent in our research criteria and is prepared to submit proposals that focus on the comparative questions that patients and those who care for them need answered. We can’t wait to see what we’ll find in our next cycle – and beyond. I hope you’ll be among those applying.
As always, I and my staff welcome your questions about our any aspect of our work. Feel free to contact us at info@pcori.org.