In an interview at the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory Steering Committee’s annual meeting in April, Dr. Lesley Curtis, Dr. Adrian Hernandez, and Dr. Kevin Weinfurt discussed the program’s plans for the future.
“The NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory is developing the fundamental knowledge necessary to build a learning health care system,” said Hernandez. “The Collaboratory is learning how to embed clinical trials as part of healthcare delivery to accelerate evidence generation.”
Curtis, Hernandez, and Weinfurt are co-principal investigators of the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory Coordinating Center at Duke University.
In August 2022, the program plans to add 2 Core Working Groups, one focused on health equity and the second on implementation science.
“Health equity is an issue that is front-and-center for all of us,” Curtis said. “To have a group of experts in the field who can consult with new NIH Collaboratory Trials to give them guidance about best practices for addressing health equity will be fabulous.”
As the NIH Collaboratory moves forward, the program will focus its efforts on bringing in more diverse researchers and trainees into the program.
When asked about how the NIH Collaboratory has fulfilled its mission over the last 10 years, Weinfurt said, “Toward the broad goal of improving our national capacity to do embedded trials, we have improved the knowledge base that future trialists can use to develop new trials. We’ve generated tools and approaches to solve challenges that arose, trained and increased the number of researchers who are familiar with embedded pragmatic trials, and encouraged trials to develop their own networks to continue conducting these embedded trials.”
“We’ll know we’ve succeeded when all of the barriers and challenges that we’ve been working on over the last 10 years have run out,” said Curtis.
See the complete materials from the 2022 Steering Committee meeting.