For the last five months, members of an independent organization established by the Affordable Care Act have been developing a national priorities agenda that may transform medical care and save healthcare dollars. The first draft of that agenda will become available for public comment beginning Monday.
Through the ACA, Congress established the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) with a budget of $3 billion over 10 years to support comparative effectiveness research. PCORI’s role is advisory rather than mandatory. If successful, its research will offer information to healthcare providers and to patients that will lead to better health outcomes and lower healthcare costs.
[See also: Patient-centered outcomes pilot project grants announced.]
Over the last year, members of PCORI’s Board of Governors have conducted meetings with stakeholders across the country in order to inform the direction its research should go. The result of all those discussions is what the PCORI board is calling its first draft national priorities agenda.
“We’re on a journey,” said Carolyn Clancy, MD, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and PCORI board member, during the first day of two days of board meetings this week. “That is to say that the process is at least as important as the final output or outcome, and it’s going to be an ongoing iterative process.”
In its conversations with stakeholders the focus was on how to best bring the promise of the legislation forward, said Harlan Krumholz, PCORI board member and Yale University cardiologist.
“I want to emphasize within the legislation there is this piece that really suggests that we should be thinking about return on investment. This is ultimately an investment by the American people. It’s an investment by our government in an independent group and we want to be able to derive marked benefits for patients and the public,” Krumholz said. “In order to do that we need to listen carefully to those out in our environment and we are really vehicles for the kind, I think, of hopes and aspirations that exist throughout the community.”
In its first draft national priorities agenda the organization believes its research should focus on:
- Comparing the effectiveness and safety of alternative preventive, diagnostic and treatment options.
- Improving healthcare systems by comparing system approaches to improving access, supporting patient self-care, innovative uses of health information technology, care coordination and effective use of the workforce.
- How to best communicate comparative effectiveness information and how to encourage shared decision making between patients and providers.
- Identifying and recognizing the differences in patient populations and how to achieve best outcomes in each population.
- Improving the country’s capacity to conduct patient-centered outcomes research by building data infrastructure, improving analytic methods and training researchers, patients and other stakeholders.
“No one on the board believes that this is a final version,” Krumholz said of the national priorities agenda. “We believe that at this point in our development this represents a big advance. It’s a lot of progress in terms of defining those areas that we’re most interested in, that we think the nation most needs based on the input we have received.”
The national priorities agenda will be posted on PCORI’s website on Monday.
Follow HFN associate editor Stephanie Bouchard on Twitter @SBouchardHFN.