The NIH Collaboratory launches into its tenth year with a new name, continued commitment, and enhanced web tools and resources.
Celebrating a decade of progress, the NIH Collaboratory is donning a new name—NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory—that will carry the highly successful program into the future with a continued commitment to transforming clinical research. The program was formerly known as the NIH Health Care Systems Research Collaboratory. Its new moniker reflects the program’s core mission of strengthening the national capacity to implement cost-effective, large-scale research studies conducted within healthcare delivery systems, also known as pragmatic trials.
“Pragmatic trials are even more important for the future of improving health around the nation, and the program’s new name reflects our leadership in this area,” said Adrian Hernandez, MD, MHS, one of three principal investigators of the NIH Collaboratory Coordinating Center at the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI). “I’m proud of all we’ve accomplished over the last ten years, and I’m excited to see the advances yet to come. Every Collaboratory project is a new opportunity to improve pragmatic trials and generate knowledge that can benefit patients.”
The program began in 2012 as an initiative supported by the NIH Common Fund to drive innovation in clinical trials. Over the past 10 years, the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory has supported 22 pragmatic trial Demonstration Projects spanning over 1,100 clinical sites in 45 states and covering a wide range of medical conditions, including kidney disease, fibromyalgia, sickle cell disease, and cardiovascular disease. The NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory continued to expand with a 2019 grant from the Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative℠, or NIH HEAL Initiative℠, to evaluate interventions designed to improve pain management and reduce reliance on opioids.
Lessons from the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory and its Demonstration Projects are shared publicly on its continually growing online platform known as the Living Textbook of Pragmatic Clinical Trials, available at rethinkingclinicaltrials.org. In addition, the program has disseminated research findings and best practices for conducting pragmatic trials in 224 articles published in peer-reviewed journals, 380 presentations and abstracts at scientific conferences, and more than 400 public Grand Rounds webinars.
Along with its name change, the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory redesigned and enhanced the Living Textbook. Users will find a new look and streamlined navigation for accessing the program’s extensive collection of resources, including 23 online textbook chapters, 23 educational video modules, 10 archived training workshops, a data and resource sharing library with over 80 documents and datasets from Demonstration Projects, and a complete archive of the popular Grand Rounds webinar and podcast series.
“True collaboration and open sharing of knowledge are at the center of the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory,” said Gregory Simon, MD, co-principal investigator of the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory Coordinating Center from the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. “We continually update the Living Textbook to share what we learn with researchers, clinicians, patients, and policymakers.”
About the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory
The NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory Coordinating Center consists of the Duke Clinical Research Institute, the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute, the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, the University of Washington, and the University of Michigan. The program is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through cooperative agreement U24AT009676 from the Office of Strategic Coordination within the Office of the NIH Director. It is also supported by the NIH through the NIH HEAL Initiative under award number U24AT010961. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH or its HEAL Initiative. To learn more about the program, visit rethinkingclinicaltrials.org.