What’s Happening in Merit Review

To promote patient-centeredness while ensuring high-quality scientific research, we include patients, their caregivers, and other healthcare stakeholders on our panels that review applications for research funding. Participants other than researchers fill half of the positions on these panels. In this way, we can take advantage of a wide range of perspectives to meet our goal of funding research that is relevant to patients and their caregivers. So far, more than 1,000 reviewers have helped us to evaluate funding applications.

Just bringing different types of reviewers to the table, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be a meaningful exchange of ideas. One way we meet this challenge is by having mentors coach panelists on the specifics of our review criteria and scoring system, as well as how to effectively communicate with other panel members. However, we are continually working on additional means to improve our reviewer interactions and have made two important changes this year.

Merit Review Officer

In January, we modified the name and responsibilities of our staff who manage the panels that evaluate applications. Originally, those staff members had been called Scientific Review Officers (SROs), a title commonly used in other funding organizations. A subset of those SROs, known as Patient and Stakeholder Review Officers (PSROs), provided guidance exclusively to the reviewers who were not researchers. However, we found that a change was necessary to reflect the unique way that we incorporate patients and other stakeholders into our review panels.

Now, our former SROs and PSROs have become Merit Review Officers (MROs), and each serves all the members of a review panel. This change makes it clear to our scientist, patient, and other stakeholder reviewers that they are equally valuable participants on the panel. Our mentors will also continue to be an important part of reviewer support.

Another benefit of the change in the title and responsibilities of the MROs is that it helps to distinguish PCORI from other funding agencies. At no other agency do panels reviewing research proposals incorporate patients and other stakeholders as completely as those at PCORI do. Our review process reflects our emphasis on patients and caregivers, while maintaining a strong focus on scientific rigor and adherence to our methodology standards.

Moment of Recognition

For each funding cycle, reviewers do a preliminary assessment of the applications, then we bring all the reviewers together for in-person discussion. The patient, other stakeholder, and scientific reviewers meet in a plenary session before breaking into the panels that evaluate and rank proposals received in response to different funding announcements. We began our Winter 2014 session with a new activity—a moment of recognition—to highlight the importance of patient-centeredness, patient engagement, and the inclusion of patients and other stakeholders in our review process. Two of our veteran reviewers—a patient and the daughter of a patient—each spoke for a few minutes describing their experiences with health care and telling the packed ballroom why they’re participating in PCORI.

The first speaker, Sharon Cross, is a stakeholder who served as a mentor for the Winter 2014 cycle. She explained that her father’s brain tumor had initially been misdiagnosed, and she described the challenges her family faced in navigating the healthcare system. Sharon reminded us that sometimes what is important to patients is not that they can survive a little longer by undergoing yet another surgery, but the quality of their lives in the time they have left. This is an example of the knowledge patient reviewers can bring into the discussion when a panel is reviewing a proposal. Cross also noted that involvement with an organization like PCORI, which brings patients and other stakeholders into the review process, would have meant a lot to her ailing father in his final months.

The second speaker, Corey King, told the audience that he had been diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's disease in 2009, and that while the care he received was outstanding, he struggled because there was no coordination between his care providers. He said his involvement with PCORI provides an opportunity to turn the negative news of his diagnosis into a positive force, by dedicating his energies to activities that will benefit future patients. He also sees his PCORI involvement as a way to keep engaged and participating in the world—and this activity brings him a sense of well-being and control.

We’d like to thank those speakers for so aptly orienting the proceedings of the meeting to the healthcare experiences of individuals. As reviewers considered the merits of the research proposals, they kept in mind the importance of PCORI’s mission to produce reliable evidence-based information to help people make informed healthcare decisions.

We plan to begin future review sessions with similar recognition of the personal experiences of people who contribute to PCORI’s activities to enable input from patients and a broad range of other stakeholders to guide our work.

If you would like to serve as a reviewer, please learn more on our website.

Tafari is a Senior Program Officer in PCORI’s Research Integration and Evaluation program
Margosian is a Program Associate for Merit Review in PCORI’s Engagement program