Statement: PCORI Executive Director Nakela Cook on Government Accountability Office review

PCORI Executive Director Nakela L. Cook, MD, MPH, issued the following statement about the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released today on how PCORI is fulfilling its obligations under its authorizing legislation.

"PCORI leadership and staff are very pleased that the latest review by the GAO affirms that PCORI continues to meet the requirements set forth in our authorizing law to carry out priorities, programs and processes to fulfill our mission to produce and disseminate evidence-based information that enhances healthcare decisions.

"The report is a straightforward description of our activities with no GAO recommendations for improvement. This is a welcome follow-up to the GAO’s 2015 and 2018 reviews of our work, which likewise found that PCORI was meeting our mandates.

"We are particularly gratified that many of the stakeholders GAO interviewed cited the significant positive impact of PCORI’s engagement of patients in the research process on the conduct of research, research outcomes and the dissemination of findings.

"As GAO noted, we have increased our efforts to disseminate and implement results from PCORI-funded research. As part of a comprehensive set of dissemination efforts, PCORI has invested more than $60 million since 2016 in innovative projects to promote the uptake of results in practice. The review affirms we are meeting our targets for several indicators of dissemination and uptake of findings from comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER) projects we have funded, including such measures as uptake into clinical decision support tools.

"GAO also noted our progress on implementing new provisions of our authorizing law, which included new priority topic areas among other new requirements in addition to extending PCORI’s funding through fiscal year 2029. We have held multiple discussions with stakeholders about incorporating a focus on these topics—intellectual and developmental disabilities and maternal mortality—in our research funding and related activities. This collaborative approach with patients and the healthcare community is essential as we refresh our National Priorities and Research Agenda for PCORI’s next phase.

"We are confident the results coming from the studies we fund, our efforts to support the implementation of useful results in practice and our leadership in advancing patient-centered, stakeholder-driven CER will continue to provide the evidence-based information that enables better healthcare decision making."

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