Updates to Engagement Award Funding Opportunities

Since 2014, the Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Awards program has awarded more than $95 million to fund more than 477 projects that build communities ready to engage in patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) and comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER). Supporting communities to conduct engagement projects is central to our mission to fund useful CER that leads to greater usage of research results in healthcare decision-making processes by patients and the broader healthcare community.

We are pleased to share enhancements to our three funding announcements based on responses from awardees and applicants. These opportunities continue to reflect the Engagement Awards’ support of projects that encourage active integration of patients, caregivers, clinicians, and other healthcare stakeholders as integral members of the PCOR/CER enterprise.

Key Dates to Keep in Mind

Informational Webinar: February 13, 11:30 am ET (Archived Webinar)
Letter of Inquiry Submission Period Opens: February 14, 9 am ET
Letter of Inquiry Submission Deadline: May 1, 5 pm ET

Engagement Awards: Capacity Building

This award will continue to fund projects that build communities prepared to participate in PCOR/CER and serve as channels for disseminating study results. In addition to those funding priorities, we’ve expanded the focus to offer organizations and community groups the opportunity to scale up or adopt meaningful engagement tools and resources with more communities, stakeholders, and patients, with the intent to further build capacity and skills for PCOR/CER. Projects can be for up to two years in duration and up to $250,000.

Engagement Awards: Dissemination Initiative

This award will continue to fund initiatives—not conferences—to disseminate PCORI-funded research evidence and published findings, systematic reviews, and evidence updates targeted directly to patients, clinicians, and others who can use the information to inform healthcare decisions. The purpose of dissemination is to spread and sustain knowledge and the associated evidence-based interventions. Consistent with this definition of dissemination as an active process, this initiative will not support projects primarily dependent on passive dissemination strategies (sometimes also called research diffusion) such as untargeted mass mailings, publication of study findings, and untargeted presentations to heterogeneous groups. Applicants invited to submit a full proposal are required to have written acknowledgement and/or support from the Principal Investigator—or another member of the original research team who played a significant role—of each PCORI-funded study whose published findings would be disseminated in the proposed project. Projects can be up to two years in duration and up to $250,000.

Engagement Awards: Stakeholder Convening Support

This award was previously known as Engagement Award: Conference Support. This category provides support to organizations and community groups to hold multi-stakeholder convenings, meetings, and conferences that include a variety of stakeholder groups. The convenings supported under this funding opportunity should also be designed with the active involvement of patient and community groups and organizations to bring diverse stakeholders together around a central focus or theme, such as geographic location, health condition, or population. The stakeholders will explore issues related to PCOR/CER, or communicate PCORI-funded research results to targeted end-user audiences. Projects can be up to one year in duration and up to $100,000.

PCORI Engagement Awards Evaluation Reporting Tool

PCORI has been looking to collect information about Engagement Awards that can help us evaluate individual projects and our portfolio as a whole. The Evaluation Reporting Tool, which we are introducing this cycle, will be used to ensure that a standard set of indicators is reported for Engagement Awards. 

The Evaluation Reporting Tool assesses outcomes for Reach, Engagement, Adoption, and Implementation. Our goal is to understand and evaluate engagement projects so that we can continue to learn best practices and innovative ways to ensure that patients, communities, and other stakeholders’ voices are represented in research.

Our goal is to understand and evaluate engagement projects so that we can continue to learn best practices and innovative ways to ensure that patients, communities, and other stakeholders’ voices are represented in research.

We are hopeful the tool will help us learn things such as how many people engagement techniques are reaching, and who those populations are. We are curious about how engagement of stakeholders is proposed and sustained throughout the project process. When an engagement tool is adopted, we want to know how it is being used differently and what has been done to ensure the end-user is receiving the full benefits of the tool.

Given the difficulty in applying metrics and a standard set of indicators around engagement best practices, this tool provides a baseline of outcomes to report on in Engagement Award projects. At a minimum, evaluation reports should document the reach, in numbers, of the engagement practice. We also understand that the tool will be applied flexibly from project to project: not all projects will have outcomes that fit into each category, while others might have multiple outcomes within each category.

This tool should be considered during the application phase of all Engagement Awards, so that some of these questions can be answered during implementation of the award. The tool should be uploaded with the final report of every project.

We expect that the information gleaned from the tool will lead to a more robust evaluation of individual projects and the overall PCORI Engagement Award portfolio.

We encourage interested applicants to read each funding announcement on the funding opportunities page and review the new Engagement Award Submission Instructions.

To apply beginning February 14, click the link at the bottom of the funding announcement. Please email ea@pcori.org with any questions.