PCORI Partners With 42 Health Systems to Speed Uptake of Health Research
Forty-two health systems are participating in a multiyear initiative led by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to advance the uptake of practice-changing comparative clinical effectiveness research results into healthcare practice.
With an initial investment of $50 million, PCORI initiated the first in two stages of Health Systems Implementation Initiative (HSII) funding, focusing on initial capacity-building efforts.
The array of participating health systems represents a wide range of care settings and populations and will develop and implement viable strategies to actively advance the adoption of new evidence in healthcare delivery, PCORI said.
During a March 2 media briefing about the initiative, PCORI Executive Director Nakela L. Cook, M.D., M.P.H., said dissemination and implementation of research findings is a critical piece of PCORI’s mission. “One of the ways in which PCORI is unique as a research funder is our commitment to ensuring that useful research results move beyond the pages of medical journals and are taken up into practice, where they can actually improve health outcomes,” she said. “We know that producing the information is only the first step. The best health evidence in the world is effective only if clinicians and health systems know about it and can make use of it and practice. Many of you have likely heard the oft-cited statistic that it takes an average of 17 years for new knowledge from research to be incorporated into practice. Our goal with HSII is to substantially reduce this timeframe — first within the health systems that are participating in the initiative, and then even more broadly.”
HSII participants collectively represent 800 hospitals serving 79 million unique patients—nearly a quarter of the U.S. population—across 41 states and the District of Columbia. They include academic medical centers, community-based systems, integrated health care delivery and finance systems, safety net health systems, faith-based systems, public health care delivery systems, and a medical center within the Veterans Health Administration.
Among the 42 participating health systems are Advocate Aurora Health, Ascension Health, Atrium Health, CommonSpirit Health, Harris Health System, HonorHealth, Inova Health Care Services, Jefferson Health, Kaiser Permanente Southern California, MedStar Health, University of Florida Health System, University Hospitals Health System, Valleywise Health, and WellSpan Health.
Chethan Bachireddy, M.D., is chief health officer at Texas-based Harris Health System, which is comprised of 40 inpatient and outpatient clinics. He described this initiative as unique in many regards. “It allows us to start to intentionally build the infrastructure needed to create a learning adaptive health system to move from evidence to action and to impact not just for one project, or two projects, but for all of our work moving forward into the future, and ultimately to accelerate our mission in our march towards health equity,” he said. “This requires leadership, partnership, financial support, expertise, lots of flexibility, and certainly a heavy dose of persistence.”
Peter Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., chief quality and clinical transformation officer at University Hospitals Health System in Ohio, spoke about the importance of participating in HSII. “We have about 50,000 people with diabetes in our ACO. How do we design a health system that optimizes their outcomes? In our whole system, like everybody that you know, the will isn't the issue. We are committed to zero harm and by zero harm I mean zero suffering from physical harm, zero waste, and zero inequities,” he said. “We have the clinical know-how to do this. What we lacked was the investment to better engage patients and their families in this work, to design more rigorous evaluations and then to make sure we evaluate and spread them, and this grant will allow us to build those capabilities within us, but then, most importantly, to share those with each other.”
Joanna Siegel, S.M., ScD, director of dissemination and implementation at PCORI described the three-part process of HSII. In the first step, health systems around the country submitted applications to be part of this initiative. In the next step, each participant is eligible to apply for capacity-building funding, which will support health systems in strengthening the infrastructure they'll need for upcoming implementation projects, and for the program evaluation that will be part of these efforts, she said. That funding opportunity is now open. Each participant health system can apply for up to $500,000 in capacity-building funding. In step three, PCORI will issue calls for proposals that will offer HSII participants the opportunity to propose projects to integrate evidence from PCORI-funded research into the care they provide. These projects may range from $500,000 to $5 million.
