The not-for-profit Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute Tuesday awarded more than $64 million to five comparative-effectiveness studies looking at treatment models for cancer, back pain and strokes.
The awards, ranging from $7.75 million to $14.45 million for up to five years of research, were given to studies of varying sizes, from thousands to tens of thousands of subjects. The projects, some of the largest and longest PCORI has funded, include research on individualized breast cancer screening; in-home and transitional care for stroke victims; and more intense CT scan surveillance for patients with small, potentially cancerous growths in their lungs.
Funds for the studies come from PCORI's Pragmatic Clinical Studies Initiative, launched last February. Different from traditional clinical studies, pragmatic studies test options for care across a variety of patients in real-life hospital and outpatient settings.
By conducting research in a more natural setting and engaging payers, advocacy organizations and professional societies in a study's design and implementation, the hope is that findings can be used in practice much more quickly than can those from traditional clinical trials, said PCORI Executive Director Dr. Joe Selby in a statement.
PCORI in December awarded $82.7 million to clinical research networks with access to the data of a million or more patients, in hopes of extracting unstructured, free-form data from electronic health records and interpreting it digitally through natural language processing.
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