The 2022 PCORI Annual Meeting took place on October 26-27, providing opportunities for leaders from PCORnet®, the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network, to showcase the Network’s impact. By highlighting how PCORnet has been used to answer important questions relevant to the lives of patients and those who care for them, presenters at the meeting, they demonstrated how the Network is an established, leading resource to support the next era of clinical research.
The virtual event drew researchers, clinicians, patients, and other stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem who are interested in the progress of PCORI’s funding initiatives, including PCORnet, in determining which care approaches work best, for whom, and under what circumstances. PCORnet was featured in 10 sessions across the two-day event.
Among the highlights of the meeting was a roundtable discussion titled “PCORnet-enabled Responses to COVID-19,” which showcased how PCORnet helped surface answers across three programs during the pandemic: ACTIV-6 for vaccines development, RECOVER for understanding “long COVID,” and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) COVID-19 surveillance project to track trends through time.
“The urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic is exactly the type of situation PCORnet was developed to support,” said Adrian Hernandez, co-principal investigator of ACTIV-6. “The common thread across all of these studies is that using PCORnet resources enabled researchers to connect with data and communities quickly to inform the right public health response to the pandemic with more speed than would have been possible without the PCORnet infrastructure.”
Another high point of the PCORI Annual Meeting was a panel discussion on building and sustaining learning health systems featuring Kathleen McTigue, principal investigator of PaTH, a PCORnet Clinical Research Network. McTigue discussed how PaTH is leveraging PCORnet infrastructure and findings to move from discovery to implementation. McTigue also spoke of the larger potential for PCORnet to help health systems improve.
“There are real opportunities to leverage the data query infrastructure system of PCORnet to try to make easier for health systems to open these conversations,” she said.
If you weren’t able to make the PCORI Annual Meeting but are interested in learning about more outcomes from PCORnet-leveraged research, check out the recordings of the sessions described above as well as the eight PCORnet-focused posters that were presented across the two-day event by visiting this site. From integrating claims data to complement electronic health records in PCORnet to creating a precision cancer survivorship cohort, the posters illustrate novel ways PCORnet is being used to drive meaningful health outcomes.