Public and Patient Engagement

PCORI’s Public and Patient Engagement program ensures that PCORI’s unique, patient-centered, and stakeholder-driven approach to healthcare research not only shapes the research we fund, but also influences the culture of research more broadly.

We engage all relevant stakeholders to identify and drive PCORI’s funding priorities, to conduct and disseminate the results of PCORI-funded research, and to understand and synthesize what we are learning about PCORI’s approach to engagement. This helps us inform and influence the field more broadly.

We approach our work by partnering with PCORI’s nine stakeholder groups through various methods and levels of involvement throughout the duration of a PCORI-funded project:

Strengthening patient and stakeholder relationships to ensure the growth of the PCOR community in many ways, such as:

• Facilitating local, regional, and national convenings, topical roundtable events, forums and webinars, and targeted meeting opportunities
• Starting the PCORI Ambassador Program, a national volunteer network of individuals to engage healthcare stakeholders who work at the community level to shift research culture by partnering with researchers, leading engagement initiatives, setting priorities, and spreading the word about the importance of stakeholder-engaged research
• Partnering with other departments to lead topic-refinement activities to support topic-specific, multi-stakeholder convenings that help shape PCORI’s research portfolio.

Guidance and support for engagement during the project’s lifecycle, including:

• Recruiting and training patients and other stakeholders to review every application for PCORI funding, and supporting the participation of merit reviewers each cycle through our Merit Review Mentor Program
• Providing technical support and resources to PCORI-funded research teams throughout the project lifecycle and across PCORI’s program areas to ensure meaningful engagement across all of our activities.

Promote the dissemination and uptake of PCOR by sharing research findings and strategizing ways to implement them into clinical practice and policy with our stakeholders, including:

• Recruitment and training of patient and stakeholder peer reviewers to ensure well-rounded assessments of research reports that come out of PCORI funded projects.
• Regional convenings and topic specific workshops.

Advancing the science of engagement by sharing lessons learned from the PCORI-funded research portfolio broadly by generating, translating, and sharing engagement findings with the field and promoting dissemination and uptake of effective and meaningful engagement practices. These activities include:

• Interpreting, innovating and evolving practice-based knowledge
• Analyzing peer-reviewed literature and the PCORI research portfolio to understand what we are learning about engagement and what is happening because of it
• Conducting research to explore how the influence is occurring and learn how engagement is happening on the ground
• Translating our growing knowledge through various guidance, resources, training, and publications to facilitate uptake into practice so that engaged research meets the needs of participants and is efficient for all.

We welcome the opportunity to share PCORI research findings and lessons learned in our experiences with engagement practices and methods. To submit a formal Speakers Bureau request, please complete this form. If you have general inquiries or questions for the Public and Patient Engagement team, email [email protected].

Posted: October 30, 2018