It's Looking Like a Banner Year for Results from Our Funded Studies

I’m as excited as anyone to witness the arrival of these major publications, and I look forward to their findings making their way from the journals into practice. If you’d like to read these articles for yourself, follow the links on the PCORI in the Literature section of our website. PCORI tries to make our primary-results publications available in full text, free of charge, as soon as they’re published. This page on our website is the access point to these full-text papers.

We now count about two dozen CER results papers that have been published in the past year or so from PCORI-funded studies. All are listed on the web page above, along with dozens of additional papers describing other aspects of studies we’ve supported, including protocols, qualitative descriptions, and methodological accounts.

We expect this recent upwelling in publications to mark the start of a steady stream of important CER results from PCORI-funded projects.

Beyond the Journals

Journal publication is a necessary and important means of sharing information with the scientific community. Making these results available to all in a timely way is the reason for our offer to pay the fees publishers charge to make key results accessible to the public for free. You’ll notice a growing percentage of publications listed on our website are available free to all.

But not all studies—particularly those for which the findings don’t end up supporting the original hypothesis—find a place in leading journals. However, we’ll see to it that the results of all the projects we’ve funded will be available on our website for anyone who wants to see them.

We’re doing this through our legally mandated process for peer reviewing and publicly releasing all study findings from our funded projects, which is in full swing. Within the next 60 days, we’ll start posting easy-to-read summaries of the results of each study as soon as it has gone through our peer-review process. You can find these brief summaries in the Research and Results section of our website, along with an overview of the peer reviewers’ comments and the awardees’ responses.

To make this information as useful as possible, we’ll post one summary for health professionals and one for the public, along with Spanish-language and audio versions of the public summary. We’re working with health-communications experts, patients, and other stakeholders to see that these summaries cut through the clinical jargon of conventional scientific publications to provide information is more readily useful for patients, their families, and clinicians in making healthcare decisions. We anticipate that by a year from now, about 100 of our earliest funded CER studies will have results to share on our website.

Then, generally no more than 12 months after PCORI accepts the final research report following peer review, we will post that full report. These reports will be discoverable through PubMed. That way, whether or not the results find their way into a journal publication, they will be fully available to the public. We believe this is an important step in making our research investment as transparent and useful as possible. 

Moving Results into Practice

Even publications in prestigious journals and posting of results on our website will likely not suffice to change the practices of clinicians—or of patients. One of the charges in our authorizing law, and a very reasonable one, is to see that research does change practice when appropriate. So we’re seeking additional effective ways to get the results to those who need and will use them.

This year, we’re significantly ramping up our efforts to disseminate and promote the implementation of useful new findings. In addition, we’re supporting effective dissemination strategies suggested by research teams we’ve supported. We’ve already funded five such projects through a dedicated pool of funds for dissemination and implementation activities.

The first awards include support for a statewide initiative in New York on expanding telehealth care for Parkinson’s disease. Another of these awards goes toward enhancing electronic health records with a new tool designed to better identify prediabetic patients who are most likely to benefit from a preventive medication. The next opportunity for PCORI-funded research teams with final results to apply for these funds will open in June.

Synthesizing Data

Because new research findings must usually be considered alongside previously published results, we are also beginning to produce results through systematic reviews and other forms of evidence synthesis. By assessing and synthesizing data from previously completed research on key topics, we will make the results we produce even more useful for decision makers.

Coordinating with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, we’ll first update systematic reviews comparing treatment options for four conditions: atrial fibrillation, posttraumatic stress disorder, rheumatoid arthritis, and urinary incontinence. You can get more details on our Evidence Synthesis Initiative from this recent blog post.

We hope you’ll visit our website often to view our expanding collection of study results. And we welcome your feedback on how well we are doing in our approaches to presenting the evidence generated by the studies in ways you find useful in everyday health decision making.