$40M AHRQ, PCORI Grants Will Support a Learning Health System
The grants will enhance patient-centered research at learning health system institutions across the country.

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- The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) have awarded $40 million in grants to 11 learning health system (LHS) organizations to help advance patient-centered care and research.
The goal of a learning health system is to apply data analytics and evidence-based policies to the challenges of patient-centered care improvement.
Providers and health system leaders will work together to update and disseminate data to clinical teams and effectively communicate this information to patients to support shared decision-making.
As the healthcare industry relies more on big data to generate actionable insights, learning health systems will become essential to enhancing care delivery.
“Learning health systems aim to improve patient care through the use of real-time data and analytics,” said AHRQ Director Gopal Khanna, MBA.
“AHRQ is proud to collaborate with PCORI to develop a healthcare workforce trained to conduct research within a learning health system.”
The LHS Centers of Excellence funded under this initiative will train the next generation of patient-centered outcomes researchers.
Newly trained researchers and clinicians will collaborate with health system leaders and conduct studies to address how organizations can improve patient outcomes.
The $40 million initiative will span five years and will involve participation from both AHRQ and PCORI.
“The researchers supported by this initiative will support efforts to bring healthcare systems, clinicians and patients fully into the process of developing the data needed to better support personalized medical decision-making,” said PCORI Executive Director Joe Selby, MD, MPH.
“The ultimate goal for PCORI and AHRQ is to bring rigorous science to produce generalizable evidence that improves the quality of care and the health of individuals, both within and beyond these centers of excellence. These awards will help to grow the number of researchers with the knowledge and skill to learn from the real world practice going on within their delivery systems and the real world data being generated in ever-increasing quantity.”