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Introduction¹

In 2010, as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Congress established the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund (PCORTF). PCORTF funds are divided between three entities charged with meeting the goals of the PCORTF, Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and the Department of Health and Human Services’ (DHHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE). Congress’s goal was to improve the quality and relevance of evidence available to help patients and their caregivers, clinicians, payers, and policy makers make better-informed health care decisions by expanding and improving comparative effectiveness research through patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR).² PCOR studies consider the questions and outcomes that are meaningful to patients to compare the effectiveness of different prevention, diagnostic, and treatment options. PCOR also increases a patient’s involvement in their care by provid-

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¹ The planning committee’s role was limited to planning the workshop, and the Proceedings of a Workshop Series has been prepared by the workshop rapporteurs as a factual summary of what occurred at the workshop. Statements, recommendations, and opinions expressed are those of individual presenters and participants and are not necessarily endorsed or verified by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and they should not be construed as reflecting any group consensus.

² Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) compares the impact of two or more preventive, diagnostic, treatment, or health care delivery approaches on health outcomes, including those that are meaningful to patients (AHRQ, 2016).

ing them an opportunity to evaluate the quality, outcomes, and effectiveness of health care treatments and intervention, especially in areas where there is poor existing clinical evidence.

AHRQ tasked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Board on Health Care Services to host a series of public workshops that explore ways of accelerating the use of PCOR findings in clinical practice to improve health and health care. The resulting virtual workshop series, Accelerating the Use of Findings from Patient-Centered Outcomes Research in Clinical Practice to Improve Health and Health Care: A Workshop Series, comprised four virtual workshops that took place on June 9, June 17, July 1, and July 6 of 2022. The workshops’ presentations and discussions examined topics in four main categories that were described in the project’s statement of task:

1. Ways to revise and improve AHRQ’s proposed strategic plan, priorities, and strategies to make them clearer and more likely to lead to funding high-impact and complementary projects while being consistent with the congressional mandate for investing funds from PCORTF.
2. Ways to measure progress and the effect of AHRQ’s PCORTF investments as a whole on meeting its goals in the near, short, and long term.
3. Ways to better align priorities and strategies and to create complementary collaborations between the agencies charged with using PCORTF to improve patient-centered outcomes research and practice so as to increase the impact of AHRQ’s PCORTF investments and their potential to sustainably reduce disparities.
4. Ways AHRQ can apply communication science to improve dissemination of evidence, gaps in evidence, and policy gaps to inform health policies and decision makers at local, state, and federal levels.

This Proceedings of a Workshop Series summarizes the presentations and discussions. The speakers, panelists, and workshop participants presented a broad range of views and ideas. Appendix A contains the workshop statement of task. Appendix B contains the workshop agendas, Appendix C contains biographical sketches for members of the planning committee and the speakers for all four workshops, and Appendix D contains AHRQ’s proposed strategic framework for its PCORTF investments. The workshop speakers’ presentations (as PDF and audio files) have been archived online.³

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³ All workshop speaker presentations are available here: https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/accelerating-the-use-of-findings-from-patient-centered-outcomes-research-in-clinical-practice-to-improve-health-and-health-care-a-workshop-series#sectionPastEvents (accessed September 28, 2022).