These new Board members join PCORI at an especially critical time. We have much to celebrate. We’ve seen the completion of scores of funded studies with results that will help patients and those who care for them make better-informed healthcare decisions. We have launched a robust set of initiatives to promote the dissemination of those findings and their uptake in practice. We’ve built and launched a national clinical data research network, PCORnet, to conduct patient-centered research more efficiently. And we are widely recognized for having transformed the way health research is conducted in this country by actively engaging patients and other stakeholders in all we do.

But we also know that we have much more to accomplish in the years ahead on behalf of the stakeholder communities we serve, especially as we look to Congress to reauthorize our funding. Our new Board members will play a key role in guiding us in those efforts, working closely with the colleagues who helped to bring us so far and accomplish so much.

We welcome the fresh stakeholder perspectives these new members will bring to our mission of building a body of evidence that shows which care approaches work best, for whom, given outcomes important to patients. Our new Board members will inherit a robust collection of research and other initiatives and help us find new and creative ways to both build it into an even more transformative portfolio of useful evidence more likely to be adopted in real-world practice.

But as excited as we are to welcome a new class of Board members, it is difficult to see so many long-time friends and colleagues leave us.

We are very grateful to them for their leadership in turning a challenging piece of legislation into an institution that can fill key clinical evidence gaps in unique new ways, an approach we’ve come to call research done differently. They were the first to recognize that if you’re going to be the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, you’d better figure out how to involve patients throughout the research process–and they helped us do just that. It sounds intuitive now, but at the time, it was revelatory.

In the intervening eight years, their leadership helped to shape our funding strategies, supported a greatly enhanced and sophisticated approach to stakeholder engagement, led to the implementation of our processes for ensuring that we peer review our research and make the findings as quickly and widely available to the public as possible, and, just recently, approved our new policy requiring PCORI awardees to share their data sets and documentation for reanalysis and reuse. 

We know our Board, new members and veterans alike, will provide the same sort of leadership as we focus on new ways to meet our stakeholders’ needs for useful evidence, answering the questions important to them as they make the challenging decisions we all face in a fast-evolving, ever-more-complex healthcare system.

You can learn more about the latest additions to our Board on the GAO website, and refamiliarize yourself with their colleagues on PCORI’s website. They, and I, thank you for your interest in our work.