PCORI seeks to fund pragmatic clinical trials, large simple trials, or large-scale observational studies that compare two or more alternatives for addressing prevention, diagnosis, treatment, or management of a disease or symptom; improving healthcare system-level approaches to managing care; communicating or disseminating research results to patients, caregivers, or clinicians; or eliminating health or healthcare disparities.

Proposed studies must address critical clinical choices faced by patients, their caregivers, clinicians, or delivery systems. They must involve broadly representative patient populations and be large enough to provide precise estimates of hypothesized effectiveness differences and to support evaluation of potential differences in treatment effectiveness in patient subgroups.

PCORI’s multi-stakeholder panels have identified 16 high-priority topics and research questions. (See Appendix for list.) PCORI will give first consideration to applications that directly address one or more of the 16 PCORI identified topics. Note that PCORI is open to receiving and reviewing LOIs for studies on investigator-initiated CER questions as well.

Note that this funding program does not support applications to conduct cost-effectiveness analyses, systematic reviews (with or without meta-analyses), or developing or evaluating shared decision-making or decision-support tools. In general, PCORI will not cover costs for interventions that are being compared in the proposed study. (See Appendix 3 in the Application Guidelines for details.)

This announcement is a collaborative effort of PCORI’s Comparative Clinical Effectiveness Research, Communication and Dissemination Research, Improving Healthcare Systems, and Addressing Disparities research programs.