Background: Although partnership sustainability has been identified as a key requirement for success in collaborative fields, there are no current best practices recommendations to achieve sustainability in patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) partnerships. This is a major technical issue in the PCOR field as sustainability is not only necessary to conduct long-term research studies but is critical to accomplishing the PCORI strategic initiatives to disseminate research results and build long-lasting infrastructure to conduct PCOR.

Proposed Solution to the Problem: The Partners interested in Partnership Sustainability (PiPS) Team proposes to host a collaborative conference focused on PCOR partnership sustainability. Through a four-phase conference, the team will bring together representatives of the PCOR community to determine the priority topics concerning PCOR partnership sustainability and collectively identify the key themes and components that can promote sustainable partnerships.

Objectives: This conference will be carried out in four phases, with each phase designed to increasingly engage more members of the PCOR community. The collective formed through this conference will produce meaningful resources and guidelines reflective of real-world experiences that can be used to promote partnership sustainability as well as inform the development of sustainability methodological standards that can be applied at the onset of a PCOR project.

Activities: In Phase 1, the project team will establish the PCOR Sustainability Panel to identify priority topics in PCOR partnership sustainability. In Phase 2, a Shared Learning Collaborative will be formed to allow participants to share their thoughts on these priority topics. In Phase 3, the team will host an interactive workshop where attendees will discuss the emerging common themes in sustainability in order to collectively come to a consensus surrounding the themes in each priority topic in PCOR partnership sustainability. In Phase 4, breakout workgroups comprised of workshop participants will be formed. The objectives are to disseminate the lessons learned and translate the common themes into the beginnings of a toolkit designed to facilitate and promote PCOR partnership sustainability.

Outcomes and Outputs: One anticipated outcome is the creation of a diverse community skilled in PCOR, committed to the topic of partnership sustainability, and knowledgeable on best practices in these relationships. Project-specific deliverables include publications in multiple forms and a sustainability toolkit that will be publicly disseminated. The engagement strategies employed throughout this project are expected to produce relevant, unbiased information that will be useful to the wider PCOR community, thereby facilitating dissemination efforts and increasing the usability, accessibility, and availability of this information. These outcomes are significant in their contributions toward establishing best practices methodology for partnership sustainability in PCOR.

Patient and Stakeholder Engagement Plan: Patients and stakeholders will be defined as individuals with previous experience in PCOR and PCOR-like partnerships. These individuals will be identified and engaged with assistance from qualified community partners and collaborative organizations. Patients and stakeholders will be engaged consistently and meaningfully throughout each of the four project phases.

Project Collaborators: Trailhead Institute, University of Colorado