Areas of Interest for the Pilot Projects Grants Program

The funding announcement for PCORI’s Pilot Projects Grants Program lists eight areas of interest. Projects eligible for funding under the announcement must address one or more of the areas, which are summarized as follows:

1. Developing or evaluating methods (qualitative and quantitative) that can help establish national priorities for patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR). This may include research prioritization approaches for engaging patients or other stakeholders into the development of national priorities.
2. Developing methods for bringing together patients, caregivers, clinicians, and other stakeholders in all stages of a research process, including methods for training participants in participatory research and new technologies to facilitate engagement.
3. Developing or evaluating patient-centered approaches and decision-support tools for translating evidence-based care into health care practices that account for individual patient preferences for various outcomes. This may include models for disseminating research findings from the patient perspective.
4. Developing or evaluating methods to identify gaps in comparative-effectiveness knowledge as perceived by patients and providers—especially gaps relevant to vulnerable populations, such as low-income populations, minorities, children, the elderly, women, and people with disabilities, chronic, rare, and/or multiple medical conditions.
5. Identifying or evaluating patient-centered outcomes instruments, such as predictive tools that measure or predict outcomes of interest to patients, or tools for standardizing measurement of patient-reported outcomes across a variety of interventions and patient populations.
6. Identifying or evaluating methods to assess the patient perspective when researching behaviors, lifestyles, and choices within the patient’s control that may influence their outcomes.
7. Identifying or evaluating methods for studying patient care team’s interaction in situations where multiple options for wellness, prevention, diagnosis or treatment exist, especially strategies that respect patient autonomy and promote informed decision-making.
8. Advancing analytical methods for comparative-effectiveness research (CER), such as incorporating mixed methods research designs (qualitative/quantitative), the use of instrumental variables, and potential solutions for assessing treatment heterogeneity in observational and randomized CER studies.