Funding Opportunity for Implementing and Evaluating Patient-Centered Clinical Decision Support Strategies in Real-World Settings

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ) mission is to produce evidence to make healthcare safer, higher quality, more accessible, equitable, and affordable. AHRQ works within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and with other partners to ensure that the evidence is understood and used.

AHRQ is offering a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) to solicit applications to support research on patient-centered clinical decision support (PC CDS), a nascent area within the larger field of CDS. Innovative collaborative research to understand how clinical decision support tools in real healthcare settings can be improved to become more patient centered is needed. Clinical decision support refers to digital tools that are used to help inform patient care. PC CDS, in contrast to traditional clinician-facing CDS, is CDS that focuses on the patient, or their caregiver, and facilitates their active involvement in healthcare decision-making with their clinicians. PC CDS uses information from patient-centered outcomes research findings and/or patient-specific information and has the potential to be transformative by enabling higher-quality care delivery and improved outcomes.

Through the AHRQ-funded Patient Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) CDS Initiative and the CDS Innovation Collaborative in particular, PC CDS resources are now publicly available for investigator-initiated research to further develop, test, and build upon in real-world healthcare settings. Using these resources as starting materials, applicants will propose innovative collaborative research to understand how CDS tools in real-world healthcare settings can be improved to become more patient centered. Funded research will contribute to generalizable knowledge about how patients, families, and caregivers can become meaningful partners in the co-design, implementation, use, and evaluation of PC CDS.

This NOFO contributes to AHRQ's research priorities in digital healthcare research, including a focus on patient centered CDS. Several past projects have generated resources that could be highly useful to the developing PC CDS field. Examples of these projects include AHRQ’s PC CDS Learning Network and CDS Connect, as well as a project that assessed the current state and future directions of PC CDS. AHRQ’s most recent PC CDS project, the CDS Innovation Collaborative, or CDSiC, is a multi-component stakeholder-driven initiative that produced a rich set of resources and tested concepts around different aspects of PC CDS. Additional information for these CDS projects is available on the PCOR CDS Initiative webpage. AHRQ's PC CDS resources must serve as a starting point for this research. As part of the cooperative agreement, grantees must become part of a PC CDS community that includes AHRQ, the CDSiC, and other researchers to support collaborative learning and dissemination of best practices. This community may also include researchers such as health information technology experts, patient advocates and representatives, clinicians, electronic health record developers, policymakers, payors, or leaders from research and academic medical institutions.

This Notice is being provided to allow potential applicants sufficient time to develop meaningful collaborations and responsive projects. The NOFO is expected to be published in late Spring 2024 with an expected application due date in Summer 2024.

Please direct all inquiries to:

James Swiger, MBE
Center for Evidence and Practice Improvement
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
clinicaldecisionsupport@ahrq.hhs.gov