Patient-centered outcomes research

March 7, 2018: FDA Offers Workshop on Submitting Draft Guidance on Patient Experience Data

Posted on by Karen Staman

The FDA is conducting a public workshop on Monday, March 19, to obtain input from stakeholders—including patients, patient advocates, academic and medical researchers, expert practitioners, drug developers, and other interested persons—to inform the drafting of a patient-focused drug development guidance as required by the 21st Century Cures Act. Workshop attendees will discuss considerations for development and submission of a proposed draft guidance regarding patient experience data submitted by an external stakeholder. The guidance is intended to help stakeholders continue progress in developing new medicines to respond to patient’s needs.

Registration for the event, either in person or via a live webcast, ends March 12. More meeting details, including background materials, will be posted by FDA as available.

February 28, 2018: New Meeting Summary Examines How to Integrate Patient‐Reported Health Data for Pragmatic Research

Posted on by Karen Staman

A recently released summary from the ADAPTABLE Roundtable Meeting explores ways to better understand the sets of circumstances and considerations that could guide when and how to gather and integrate patient-reported health data with other data sources in pragmatic trials.

For outcomes that represent subjective experiences, such as pain, symptoms, and physical functioning, the patient is the unique and privileged source of information. Other patient-reported health data may not have a clear source of truth, such as co-morbidities and hospitalizations. In such cases, patient-reported health data may supplement, contradict, or agree with EHR and claims data. For example, medication data reported by patients might be a more accurate reflection of what patients are actually taking than medication data in the EHR, especially for over-the-counter medications.

Patient-reported health data come from various sources and can be feasibly collected in the conduct of a pragmatic clinical trial, but the optimal approaches for capturing and analyzing these data are unclear. Questions include how to integrate this information with other data collected as part of a study, including data from the EHR.

To better understand patient-reported health data and how to use them in pragmatic trials, 18 experts from 8 institutions convened at the roundtable meeting, coming from a wide variety of backgrounds including biostatistics, epidemiology, oncology, nursing, psychiatry, health policy, and regulation. Representatives from the NIH Collaboratory included Drs. Lesley Curtis and Rachel Richesson from the EHR Core and Dr. Kevin Weinfurt from the Patient-Reported Outcomes Core.

In addition to the meeting summary, two white papers are forthcoming. For more information about using patient-reported data in pragmatic trials, see the Living Textbook Chapter on Endpoints and Outcomes.

This effort was funded by Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services through a supplement provided to the NIH Collaboratory Coordinating Center.

January 22, 2018: AHRQ Announces Competition to Develop Patient-Reported Outcomes Tools

Posted on by Karen Staman

Patient-reported outcome (PRO) data are critical for informing patient-centered care and patient-centered outcomes research, although they are not commonly collected in routine care, and are often not available for use in clinical care or research. To counter this problem, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) announced an upcoming competition to develop tools to collect and integrate PRO data in electronic health records and other health IT products. During this multi-phase Challenge Competition in the fall of 2018, developers will be asked to create user-friendly application programming interfaces (APIs) and other tools that can be used to collect physical function data in ambulatory care settings based on specifications provided by AHRQ. The tools will enable PRO data to be shared more easily and regularly with clinicians and researchers.

January 17, 2018: The “All of Us” Research Program Asks for Research Ideas

Posted on by Karen Staman

The groundbreaking “All of Us” research program, which aims to enroll and track more than a million people, is asking prospective researchers, community organizations, and citizen scientists for suggestions regarding potential research questions. Ideas can be submitted through a special research page and are due by February 23, 2018. At a Research Priorities Workshop in March 2018, meeting attendees will use the input to set research priorities that will drive the development of the All of Us research platform and associated tools.

New White Paper from Collaboratory PRO Core on the Impact of Patient-Reported Outcomes on Clinical Practice

Posted on by Karen Staman

Patient-reported outcome (PRO) measures are often used in pragmatic clinical trials to assess endpoints that are meaningful to stakeholders. These measures may also support patient care, although there is mixed evidence about effects of PROs on (1) improved patient-provider communication, clinical decision-making, and patient satisfaction; (2) enhanced patient outcomes; and (3) helped ensure better quality of care from a healthcare systems perspective. In a new white paper from the Collaboratory Patient-Reported Outcomes Core, the available evidence in the literature is examined to determine when PROs have the potential to provide added value to patient care.

The full text of the white paper can be found here: Impact of Patient-Reported Outcomes on Clinical Practice_V1.0

PCORnet Posts Aspirin Study Protocol for Public Review and Comment

Posted on by Gina Uhlenbrauck

PCORnetThe National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet) has recently made a draft protocol for its first randomized clinical trial available for stakeholder review. Researchers, clinicians, patients and the public are all invited to read the current draft of the study protocol and provide comments and feedback.

The ADAPTABLE Study (PDF), which will investigate whether lower- or higher-dose aspirin is better for preventing heart attack and stroke in patients at risk for heart disease, is PCORnet’s first randomized pragmatic clinical trial. Designed to leverage PCORnet’s Clinical Data Research Networks (CDRNs) and Patient-Powered Research Networks (PPRNs), the trial will serve as twofold purpose: answering a clinical question of direct importance for patients, families, and healthcare providers, and serving as a demonstration of PCORnet’s capabilities in conducting clinical research on a national scale.

Links to the proposed study protocol, a survey tool for capturing feedback, and other information about ADAPTABLE Study, including press releases, fact sheets, and infographics, are available at the link below:

ADAPTABLE: The Aspirin Study

Follow PCORnet on Twitter @PCORnetwork for updates on the ADAPTABLE #ClinicalTrial

In the News: Increase in Use of Personal Health Data

Posted on by Gina Uhlenbrauck

An explosion in the collection of personal data is fostering concerns about the extent to which health information is accessed—and about the privacy and confidentiality of this information. Two recent National Public Radio stories highlight a few of the burgeoning uses of these abundant data.

In the first, an insurer uses personal data to predict who will get sick so it can identify patients at highest risk for hospital admission, or readmission, and then provide them with personal health coaches. The coordinated care given to patients by the coaches (for example, arranging a visiting nurse or streamlining appointments) has been shown to improve hospitalization rates. The insurer says it follows federal health privacy guidelines for anonymity and uses the information to better serve its members.

The second story explains that results of online health searches aren’t always confidential, and data brokers are tracking information and selling it to interested parties. The author notes that data gathered on the Web are, for the most part, unregulated. Both stories raise questions about privacy and confidentiality of health information and how to best protect it.

Pragmatic clinical trials also seek to use personal health data to answer important questions on the risks, benefits, and burdens of therapeutic interventions. In a blog post in Health Affairs, Joe Selby, executive director of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), underscores the need for trust, support, and active engagement of patients when involving them in health data research, even with privacy protections in place. PCORI has launched the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet) as a means of harnessing large clinical data sets to study the comparative effectiveness of treatments, and a central tenet of the network is that patients, clinicians, and healthcare systems should be actively involved in the governance of the use of health information.

Read the full articles

From NPR: Insurer Uses Personal Data To Predict Who Will Get Sick
From NPR: Online Health Searches Aren't Always Confidential
From Health Affairs: Advancing the Use of Health Data in Research With PCORnet

 

PCORI Announces First PCORnet NIH Collaboratory Trial: The ADAPTABLE Aspirin Study

Posted on by Gina Uhlenbrauck

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) has approved the first pragmatic clinical trial to be performed through the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet)—the ADAPTABLE study (Aspirin Dosing: A Patient-centric Trial Assessing Benefits and Long-term Effectiveness).

Over the course of the trial, 20,000 study participants with cardiovascular disease will be randomly assigned to receive one of two commonly used doses of aspirin—a low dose of 81 mg per day versus a higher dose of 325 mg per day—in order to determine which provides the optimal balance between protecting patients with cardiovascular disease from heart attack and stroke, and minimizing bleeding events associated with aspirin therapy. The trial will also employ a number of innovative methods, including electronic health record (EHR)-based data collection and a patient-centered, web-based enrollment model in partnership with the Health eHeart Alliance Patient-Powered Research Network (PPRN).

The ADAPTABLE trial, which includes six of PCORnet’s Clinical Data Research Networks (CDRNs), will be led and coordinated through the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI).

Read more about the ADAPTABLE Aspirin Trial here:
Fact Sheet (PDF)
Infographic (PDF)
DCRI Coordinating Center Announcement

PCORnet: “Not your father’s clinical trial network”

Posted on by Gina Uhlenbrauck

“PCORnet: Turning a Dream Into Reality,” an editorial published online this week in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, details the promises of the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet):

“Providing accurate answers based on the highest levels of scientific evidence for the majority of unresolved clinical questions is a revolutionary dream shared by patients, providers, payers, health plans, researchers, and policy makers alike. PCORnet, the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network, promises a transformative platform that will turn this revolutionary dream into reality.”

The authors describe PCORnet’s patient-centered vision and how its transformative clinical research will be carried out through a national research network. This “network of networks” is designed to include a large, highly representative population. PCORnet will first work to establish data architecture and standards and address key policy questions, followed by the conduct of its first pragmatic clinical trial slated to begin in September 2015.

Editorial authors include NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, Kathy L. Hudson, PhD, and Josephine P. Briggs, MD.

Institute of Medicine Convenes PCORI-Sponsored Workshop on Integration of Care and Research

Posted on by Gina Uhlenbrauck

Update:

Slides and a workshop summary are now available from the Institute of Medicine website.

On April 23-24, 2014, the Institute of Medicine held a Roundtable on Value & Science-Driven Health Care workshop titled “Health System Leaders Working Towards High Value Care Through Integration of Care and Research” in Washington, DC. The workshop, sponsored by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), brought together stakeholders from across research networks, health systems, industry, and the patient community to engage on barriers and opportunities in building a continuously learning health system, where routinely collected health data informs improvements in evidence-based care. Eric Larson, MD, MPH, of the Group Health Research Institute chaired the workshop Planning Committee.

Workshop goals included:

  • Fostering the development of a shared commitment, vision, and strategy among health system leaders building a national clinical research network
  • Broadening and deepening health systems’ leadership awareness of the prospects for and from a continuously learning health system
  • Learning from models and examples of productive integration of research with care delivery programs
  • Identifying common issues compelling to health systems leaders related to science, technology, ethics, regulatory oversight, business, and governance
  • Exploring strategic opportunities for executive, clinical, and research leaders to forge working partnerships for progress
  • Considering the approach and desirable outcomes of a meeting of CEO leaders vital to building and sustaining a functional, real-time national clinical research network

One particular focus of the meeting was the recently launched National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet). Workshop participants included representatives from PCORnet’s Clinical Data Research Networks and Patient-Powered Research Networks. Speakers provided real-world examples of learning health systems and urged leaders to make a business case for the learning health system model. Speed and dissemination of research were discussed as important considerations for patients.

The meeting was open to the public via webcast. Archived meeting presentations will be made available; a link will be provided in an update to this post. Workshop-related tweets can be found with the hashtag #IOMPCORI.

View the workshop agenda and briefing materials.