Why PCORI Was Created

Patients, their families, and clinicians face a wide range of complex and often-confusing choices when it comes to health and healthcare concerns. They need trustworthy information to decide which treatment or other care option is best for them.

Unfortunately, traditional health research, for all the remarkable advances it produces, hasn’t been able to answer many of the questions patients and their clinicians face daily. The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), an independent nonprofit, nongovernmental organization in Washington, DC, was authorized by Congress in 2010 to close that gap.

Our mandate is to improve the quality and relevance of evidence available to help patients, caregivers, clinicians, employers, insurers, and policy makers make better-informed health decisions. To do this, we work with those healthcare stakeholders to identify critical research questions and answer them through comparative clinical effectiveness research, or CER, focusing on outcomes important to patients. We also disseminate the results in ways that members of the healthcare community will find useful.

Since December 2012, we have funded hundreds of studies that compare healthcare options to learn which works best, given patients’ circumstances and preferences.

As the largest public research funder that focuses primarily on CER, we issue funding announcements several times each year that call for proposals for CER projects.

We include patients and other healthcare stakeholders throughout the research process, so the resulting evidence will address their most important questions and concerns. We also provide awards to encourage engagement of patients and other healthcare stakeholders in CER. 

In addition, as directed by our authorizing law, we fund research to develop and improve CER methods. We know methods matter when it comes to producing valid and trustworthy information that will lead to better healthcare decisions and, ultimately, improved patient outcomes.

Our mandate and mission are broad and complex, but in our Strategic Plan, we outline three overarching goals.
Substantially increase the quantity, quality, and timeliness of useful, trustworthy information available to support health decisions
Speed the implementation and use of patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) evidence
Influence clinical and healthcare research funded by others to be more patient-centered.
 

Underlying everything we do is a set of core values.

• Patient-Centeredness: Patients are our true north: we rely on patient perspectives and values to guide and improve our work.
• Usefulness: We focus on funding research that provides actionable answers to questions that are important to patients and the healthcare community.
• Transparency: We work in the open and facilitate public access to build trust, encourage participation, and promote implementation.
• Inclusiveness: We study broad patient populations and seek to provide evidence that is tailored to patients’ demographic or clinical characteristics and their preferences.
• Evidence: We consistently rely on the best available science and we evaluate our work to improve its reliability and utility.

 

Careers at PCORI

Do you enjoy working in a fast-paced, dynamic environment with a dedicated, mission-driven team of professionals? If so, we at PCORI invite you to apply online today for one of our openings. Here, you will find information about our open positions, benefits, and conflict of interest policy. You can also find out how to create or update an application profile. Be sure to check us out on LinkedIn and The Muse. PCORI is an equal opportunity employer committed to cultural diversity in the workplace.
 

Our Vision

Patients and the public have information they can use to make decisions that reflect their desired health outcomes.
 

Our Mission

PCORI helps people make informed healthcare decisions, and improves healthcare delivery and outcomes, by producing and promoting high-integrity, evidence-based information that comes from research guided by patients, caregivers, and the broader healthcare community.
 

Valuing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion within PCORI

Diversity, equity, and inclusion have been part of PCORI's core thinking as we have grown. We know diversity and inclusion are about the experience and culture an organization builds for itself. Our diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts stretch across our entire organization, from recruiting our workforce to cultivating business relationships.

We are increasing our outreach to historically excluded communities through our recruitment and retention efforts to build an even more diverse workforce, implementing new procurement requirements to expand and diversify our business partnerships with companies that reflect our values around diversity, equity, and inclusion, and producing an evaluation framework for assessing our progress in our diversity, equity, and inclusion goals to ensure alignment with our principles.
We have created an internal steering committee as part of our intention to embed the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion in all aspects of our work. This committee is developing a comprehensive action plan that further incorporates input from our whole workforce to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion.
We are developing a data collection strategic framework to ensure we are maximizing opportunities to capture actionable data to inform our work.