PCORI announces new research funding opportunities to improve patient-centered outcomes

Following congressional reauthorization of its funding in December 2019, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) began accepting new proposals for research designed to help patients and those who care for them to weigh their options and make better-informed healthcare decisions.

PCORI is making up to $76 million in funding available under two PCORI Funding Announcements (PFAs) focused on research. One announcement seeks the research community's best ideas for patient-centered research studies that evaluate healthcare options and ways to deliver care.

The other will fund studies designed to improve the methods for conducting patient-centered outcomes research.

While PCORI will accept proposals for studies on any topic, in this funding cycle it is particularly interested in proposals focused on two special areas of interest: maternal mortality and intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Those areas were outlined in legislation reauthorizing PCORI's funding, which was part of a federal spending bill signed into law December 20, 2019.

In addition, PCORI has also prioritized three research areas of interest based on input from clinician groups: suicide prevention, peripheral artery disease and genetic sequencing to guide cancer treatment.

A third PFA offers up to $1 million per project to support innovative ways to promote faster uptake and use of research results by patients, clinicians and other health care decision makers in typical decision-making settings.

This limited PFA enables research teams to propose the next steps to make the results of their PCORI-funded studies more readily actionable and accessible.

We are pleased to begin accepting submissions through our first funding announcements of 2020 and the first issued since reauthorization of PCORI's funding.

As these funding opportunities demonstrate, we're starting both the new year and PCORI's next 10 years with an emphasis on continuing to fulfill our mission of supporting research designed to improve care for people with a range of health conditions that impose high burdens on patients, caregivers and the health care system."

Josephine Briggs, MD, Interim Executive Director, PCORI