Leaders of the NIH Collaboratory’s Electronic Health Records (EHR) Core Working Group spoke in a recent interview about the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on pragmatic trials. They also talked about upcoming projects and a recent survey of the NIH Collaboratory Trials.
“The pandemic amplified themes that we’ve heard all along, which is how to get resources, how to get support for the data that we need for these trials or to configure EHRs as we need for these trials,” said Dr. Rachel Richesson, a professor of learning health sciences at the University of Michigan and a cochair of the EHR Core. “The pandemic just shifted priorities tremendously and made it quite challenging. As a result, we’ve had discussions about…really making the value case for pragmatic research and embedded research,” Richesson said.
Dr. Keith Marsolo, also a cochair of the Core, added, “The pandemic obviously was a big challenge for health systems in general as they transitioned to telehealth, dealt with shutdowns, things of that nature.” Marsolo is an associate professor in population health sciences at Duke University.
“Things are starting to move forward a little bit more. In one [NIH Collaboratory Trial], they were able to leverage some infrastructure that was purchased to help provide telehealth services for their region. So they’ve been able to bootstrap their trial off of that infrastructure,” Marsolo said.
Richesson also described an upcoming paper reporting the results of a recent survey of the NIH Collaboratory Trials. The survey focused on the challenges of using EHR data in pragmatic trials embedded in healthcare systems.
“No surprise on the challenges we encountered: It’s still challenging to get data from organizations for research, the data are still heterogeneous,…and there are challenges on the research team to ensure that that information is equivalent and how these data can be pulled together to support the research question,” Richesson said. “There’s a particular emphasis with the newer studies on patient-reported outcomes and how to get those collected as part of routine care,” she said.
