HHS wants to improve the availability of data and resources for generating high-quality evidence on the effectiveness of treatments, services, and other health care interventions.

Patients, health care providers, and policymakers and others deserve to know which health care approaches work and which don’t. The Patient-Centered Outcomes Trust Fund (PCORTF) was created by the Affordable Care Act to advance a patient-centered health care system characterized by evidence-based care and integrated decision-making among providers, patients, and caregivers. Recognizing the need for high quality and accessible data to generate this evidence base, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) sought to engage in inter-departmental activities that enhance data infrastructure available to PCOR researchers. They support these activities through a portfolio of federal projects funded through the Office of Secretary PCOR Trust Fund (OS-PCORTF).

NORC created a dedicated Resource Center to support ASPE’s federal efforts to improve data infrastructure available for patient-centered outcomes research.

Since 2015, NORC and our partner, AcademyHealth, have supported the ASPE by managing the PCOR Resource Center for Data Infrastructure (Resource Center).

The Resource Center serves ASPE, OS-PCORTF awardees, and the PCOR community by providing core services in two key categories:

1. Technical assistance
2. Communication and dissemination support
    

As part of our technical assistance function, the NORC team supports strategic planning and rapid learning about emerging data infrastructure needs and other PCOR topics of interest through environmental scans of the literature, convening of technical expert panels (TEPs), and in-depth interviews with experts. Findings from these activities are shared with the PCOR community through published white papers and peer-reviewed articles. Through the Resource Center’s communication and dissemination activities NORC raises awareness about the data sets, data infrastructure resources, methods and tools that are developed by the OS-PCORTF portfolio of projects. These dissemination activities include, workshops, webinars, weekly newsletters, website updates, annual reports, project vignettes, and blog posts.