At Health Beat, Maggie Mahar has assembled a great collection of health policy blogging in a pre-election issue of the Health Wonk Review ^[1]. Among the posts she highlights: A “contributing voices” Health Affairs Blog post ^[2]by Joe Selby, the executive director of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and Rachael Fleurence, a scientist at the organization.

The authors describe the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute’s two paths for choosing research to fund: an investigator-initiated path and a patient- and stakeholder-initiated path. As indicated by the title, they spend most of their time talking about the newer of the two paths, the patient- and stakeholder-initiated path.

“We recognize that our investigator-initiated process, even with the collaboration of stakeholders, could miss important questions that matter to patients and must be implemented judiciously.  So we initiated a second path … that directly involves patients and other stakeholders in generating questions that address specific problems identified as having a significant impact on them and the health care system as a whole,” Selby and Fleurence write.

For more on PCORI and comparative effectiveness research, see the October issue of Health Affairs, “Current Challenges In Comparative Effectiveness Research ^[3],” and the release event for the issue ^[4].