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It’s been just over two years since we launched the P2P Award initiative, a program to help those not usually involved in patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER) build a community with the expertise and passion to do so. The program, actually the brainchild of patients and patient advocates who attended a 2012 PCORI workshop, also seeks to create research partnerships within that community that lead to funded research projects.  

Now, after three cycles of funding and more than 200 awards, we are applying lessons learned from this program to restructure it to be more efficient.

New Structure, Same Goals

The goals of the P2P program remain the same. However, we are moving from three to two tiers of funding. Completing the two new tiers will take awardees 21 months; the original three-tiered program took 33 months. 

The redesigned first tier, Tier A, supports the development of research partnerships as they work together to identify a CER question—or series of questions—that are important to patients, researchers, and other healthcare stakeholders. The second tier, Tier B, helps research partnerships refine CER questions and use them to craft an application for CER study funds.

Please see our first Tier A funding announcement that opened on March 1, 2017.

Timeline for the Pipeline

We expect to make as many as 50 Tier A awards of $50,000 each to cover 12 months of partnership development. We invite applications from patients, patient organizations, other stakeholders, and researchers focused on a particular health issue that can lead to a patient-centered CER project. The deadline to submit a letter of inquiry (LOI) for these awards is April 20, and the deadline for partnerships invited to submit a full application is June 30.  

We encourage LOIs from teams that have previously submitted proposals for PCORI research funding and received recommendations to strengthen their engagement plans.

P2P awards already in progress will continue to move through the three-tiered pipeline.

Updated: August 1, 2017