Research built on real-world data — information generated during routine healthcare, such as electronic health record (EHR) and claims data — can help answer questions that are often out of reach for traditional clinical trials. However, these data often require additional context to fully understand what they mean for healthcare decisions.
Two articles featured in the February 2026 Medical Care supplement, “PCORnet®: Accelerating Patient-Centered Comparative Clinical Effectiveness Research,” highlight how meaningful engagement of patients, payers and clinicians can help study teams contextualize real-world data, improving analyses and driving further research questions.
Lessons Learned From Using PCORnet® to Support the PATHWAYS Study
In the PATHWAYS study, investigators used EHR data from across four PCORnet® STAR Clinical Research Network (CRN) sites to examine cardiology referral patterns and cardiovascular care among people living with HIV in the southern United States.
The PCORnet® Common Data Model enabled the research team to conduct longitudinal, multisite analyses; however, interpreting real-world data requires more than infrastructure alone. Because referral data were not available in the standard data model, the team created a study-specific “sidecar” referral table to capture information central to the patient experience.
The study was also among the first studies powered by PCORnet® to incorporate HIV laboratory results into its analyses, and those data required additional processing and quality checks to address differences in how results were represented across sites. Together, those efforts underscored how investigators, informatics teams and site experts must work closely together to make real-world data usable for research.
Partnerships and meaningful engagement also played a key role in helping researchers interpret information. From the outset, people with HIV served as patient partners and coinvestigators, contributing to study design, analysis plans, implementation and dissemination. Their lived experience helped provide important context for understanding EHR data, including insights into the time and steps often involved between a cardiology referral and a completed clinic visit.
The study also drew on multidisciplinary expertise, including HIV specialists, cardiologists, statisticians and site-based data teams, showing that understanding care pathways in real-world data depends on collaboration across clinical, analytic and patient perspectives.
“PATHWAYS illustrates that partnership is not peripheral to real-world data research,” said Gerald Bloomfield, MD, MPH, PATHWAYS investigator. “Patients are central to making the data meaningful.”
Read the full publication here.
PCORnet® Clinical Research Networks Partner With Health Plans
Another article in the Medical Care supplement highlights how partnerships with health plans and public payers can help researchers build a more comprehensive picture of care by linking EHR data with claims data.
Across PCORnet® CRNs such as REACHnet, PaTH and OneFlorida+, collaborations between researchers and payers make it possible to examine care across multiple settings and systems, capturing information that may not appear clearly from a single data source alone.
The article emphasizes that bringing together clinical and claims data can expand the types of outcomes researchers are able to study while helping address limitations inherent in either source alone. It also highlights how collaboration between researchers and payers can help drive research relevant to improving health systems.
For example, OneFlorida+ conducted a study of hepatitis C screening among Medicaid beneficiaries at high risk for infection. By linking Medicaid claims from 2012 to 2018 with EHR and laboratory data from the OneFlorida+ Data Trust, investigators were able to examine testing patterns in a statewide cohort and better understand follow-up screening patterns and gaps.
Rather than relying on a single type of record, the study drew on laboratory results, procedure codes, diagnoses, pharmacy claims and enrollment information such as months covered by Medicaid and dual eligibility status. The combined data gave researchers more clinical context, including how clinical factors, coverage patterns and social and demographic characteristics were associated with receiving recommended testing.
Similarly, as part of the PCORnet® Study Understanding How Antibiotic Use Affects Childhood Obesity and Growth, REACHnet partnered with Humana to conduct a substudy to examine how antibiotic use before age 2 was associated with weight outcomes later in childhood. By linking pharmacy claims with EHR data from a REACHnet partner health system, the team found that 60% of patients had consistent antibiotic medication data across the two sources, while about a quarter of dispensing claims reflected prescriptions written outside the partner health system. This substudy demonstrated the value of partnering with a health plan to help fill important gaps in EHR medication data and strengthen analyses that depend on a more complete picture of care.
“Working together, clinicians, patients and payers help identify important outcomes that may require combined data sources to best measure,” said Elizabeth Nauman, PhD, MPH, an author on the publication and dual principal investigator for REACHnet. “Some outcomes are captured in claims data, like medication dispensing, healthcare utilization and cost, and other outcomes, such as weight, are collected in clinical data.”
More broadly, the authors write, payer engagement helps address a longstanding gap in comparative clinical effectiveness research where payers are recognized as key stakeholders but are often absent from the research process. By involving payers not only in data sharing, but also in research prioritization and learning health system activities, PCORnet® CRNs can help generate research questions aimed at improving care delivery.
“Beyond data sharing, PCORnet® Network Partners collaborate with members of the payer community to prioritize research topics, identify study outcomes that matter to patients and are of value to payers, conceptualize learning health system transformation and participate in learning communities,” said Kathleen McTigue, MD, MS, MPH, publication author and co-principal investigator of the PaTH Network. “These collaborations hold promise for developing and carrying out high-value research that can improve clinical care, health plan policy and even the design of benefits.” Read the full publication here.
Together, the two articles illustrate how multidisciplinary partnerships can help make real-world data more meaningful and more useful. Patients help researchers understand what the data miss or misrepresent; clinicians and data teams help connect documentation patterns to clinical care processes; and payer partnerships make it possible to link complementary data sources and study outcomes that matter to patients, providers and health systems alike.
Explore the Medical Care Supplement
The publications highlighted here are part of the recent Medical Care supplement, “PCORnet®: Accelerating Patient-Centered Comparative Clinical Effectiveness Research.” The supplement includes 19 peer-reviewed, open-access articles showcasing how investigators are using PCORnet to reshape patient-centered health research. Learn more and explore the full supplement.
Contact the PCORnet® Front Door to learn how the PCORnet infrastructure can support your patient-centered health research.
