Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Montefiore Medical Center have received a $2.5 million grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to establish a training program to improve the practice of healthcare in real-world settings.

The program, in the emerging area of patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR), will be housed in the Harold and Muriel Block Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at Einstein and Montefiore and will prepare established and junior investigators to initiate and lead research in this area.

"Researchers are adept at evaluating new treatments and diagnostics in controlled settings, but their results do not capture how people use them in their day-to-day lives," said Paul Marantz, M.D., M.P.H., Principal Investigator on the grant, associate dean for clinical research education and professor of clinical epidemiology and population health at Einstein. "If we want to truly improve healthcare, we need to look at how medicine is practiced and received in real-world environments."

PCOR is intended to help patients and their physicians make informed decisions and recommendations. It aims to not only determine the most effective treatments and tests, but also flesh out and address other elements important to patients and their caregivers, such as potential harms and side effects, alternative options, personal preferences, quality of life and barriers to implementation and treatment.

The Einstein-Montefiore PCOR training program will have three components. A key element is the immersion PCOR fellowship. Researchers and physicians already well-versed in clinical research will spend three months at Montefiore's Care Management Organization (CMO), which coordinates the healthcare and disease management programs for more than 250,000 patients in the Montefiore Health System. Urvashi Patel, Ph.D., assistant professor of family and social medicine at Einstein, leads the Evaluation and Outcomes Research unit of Montefiore's CMO and will direct the fellowship.

"Montefiore's CMO is at the forefront of innovation in healthcare delivery, and uses evidence-based approaches to improve the 'Triple Aim': improved health, enhanced patient satisfaction and reduced costs," said Patel. "The PCOR fellows will both learn from, and contribute to, these innovations and improvements of our healthcare system."

The other two components of the education and training program are a certificate in PCOR and an advanced learning collaborative. The certificate program is centered on a classroom curriculum that follows PCOR methodology standards and will be led by Marantz. Among the areas covered will be qualitative research, research informatics, participatory research and implementation and dissemination of PCOR.

The advanced learning collaborative will be co-led by Julia Arnsten, M.D., M.P.H., director of the Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research and chief of the division of general internal medicine at Einstein and Montefiore, and Mimi Kim, Sc.D., director of the Quantitative Sciences in Biomedical Research Center, head of biostatistics and professor of epidemiology and population health at Einstein. The faculty collaborative will offer a forum for teaching, learning, information sharing, debate and methodology development. It will feature web-based and on-site seminars and conferences.