The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will dedicate nearly $2 million for the creation of the PCOR Clinical Decision Support Learning Network, aiming to address the barriers hindering the incorporation of patient-centered outcomes research into CDS tools.

The organization signed a four-year cooperative agreement with RTI International, a North Carolina-based nonprofit research institute, that will work with AHRQ stakeholders to address these issues. The project began on April 1, 2016,  and will continue through January 1, 2020.

"We want to address the gap between current research findings and our ability to disseminate them into clinical care," said Barry Blumenfeld, MD, senior physician informaticist at RTI and principal investigator on the project.

"Creating a learning network will foster collaboration around the identification of key patient-centered outcomes findings and their dissemination into point of care clinical decision support systems, ultimately improving patient care," he added. "This gap in translating the patient-centered outcomes research findings delays the delivery of high-quality, evidence-based data to patients."

[Also: UCSF Professor, researcher Andrew Bindman to head AHRQ]

In addition to the network, the collaboration will identify the factors impeding the incorporation of PCOR findings in CDS, while developing a solution to the problem. The group will also monitor and measure PCOR findings distribution among both vendor-based and open source CDS tools to evaluate the effectiveness of the data, which will then be implemented to increase effectiveness. The group will also develop a sustainability plan to continue a successful PCOR and CDS merger.

Twitter: @JessieFDavis
Email the writer: jessica.davis@himssmedia.com

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