Group items tagged

The OPORP Orthotics and Prosthetics Outcomes Research Award (OPORA) is being offered for the first time in FY14. It is intended to support research that evaluates the comparative effectiveness of and functional outcomes associated with prosthetic and orthotic clinical interventions and/or other rehabilitation interventions for Service Members and Veterans who have undergone limb salvage or limb amputation. The goal is to improve our understanding of and ultimately advance the implementation of the most effective prescriptions for prosthetic and orthotic devices, treatment, rehabilitation, and secondary health effect prevention options for patients, clinicians, other caregivers, and policymakers. Proposed projects should be designed to provide outcomes data regarding orthotic and prosthetic devices, and/or related clinical interventions and must include the anticipated effect on patient care metrics. Collaboration with military researchers and clinicians is encouraged, as are joint Department of Defense (DoD)-VA studies, including longitudinal outcome studies. Studies are sought that: * Compare different patient care approaches. * Include patient-centric outcome assessments. * Have the potential to generate new knowledge that can be developed into new clinical practice guidelines, and/or new prescription algorithms for prosthetic and orthotic devices. * Have the potential to develop new technology for improved prosthetic and orthotic devices, therefore improving patient outcomes. * Provide information on quality of life, reintegration, and/or return to duty/return to work as it pertains to those patients who use a prosthetic or orthotic device due to limb trauma. All applications must demonstrate direct relevance to Service Members and Veterans with traumatic extremity injury and/or amputation using prosthetics and orthotic devices. Examples of studies that are appropriate for submission to the FY14 OPORA include, but are not limited to, examination of the

The Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF) Grant Program supports research directed towards enhancing anesthesia patient safety.  The Program's objective is to stimulate and fund studies that will clearly improve patient safety and lead to prevention of mortality and morbidity resulting from anesthesia mishaps.  The APSF vision and mission statements help guide this process. The APSF's vision statement is that no patient shall be harmed by anesthesia and the mission is to improve the safety of patients during anesthesia care by encouraging and conducting: safety research and education; patient safety programs and campaigns; and national and international exchange of information and ideas.

The Doctors Company Foundation was created in 2008 by the Doctors Company, the nation's largest insurer of medical professional liability for physicians, surgeons, and other health professionals. The purpose of the foundation is to support patient safety education for healthcare professionals in training and in practice, as well as patient safety research with clinically useful applications. To advance this mission, the foundation is accepting applications for research and education programs and projects designed to enhance patient safety. Grant amounts will be determined on an individual basis based on project budget and availability of funds. The foundation does not support clinical research projects primarily involving the provision of medical support services to patients. Construction projects and the purchase of equipment will not be funded. While general funding for medical meetings and conferences will not be considered, support for invited speakers when the principal focus of their presentation is on patient safety and support for the attendance of healthcare professionals in training at patient safety conferences will be considered.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is interested in funding a diverse set of projects that develop, test and evaluate various simulation approaches for the purpose of improving the safe delivery of health care. Simulation in health care serves multiple purposes. As a training technique, it exposes individuals and teams to realistic clinical challenges through the use of mannequins, task trainers, virtual reality, standardized patients or other forms, and allows participants to experience in real-time the consequences of their decisions and actions. The principal advantage of simulation is that it provides a safe environment for health care practitioners to acquire valuable experience without putting patients at risk. Simulation also can be used as a test-bed to improve clinical processes and to identify failure modes or other areas of concern in new procedures and technologies that might otherwise be unanticipated and serve as threats to patient safety. Yet another application of simulation focuses on the establishment of valid and reliable measures of clinical performance competency and their potential use for credentialing and certification purposes. The foremost aim of the announcement is to advance patient safety. Keeping this aim in mind, applications that address a variety of simulation techniques, clinical settings, provider groups, priority populations, and patient conditions are welcomed.

The FY17 JPC-1/MSIS TRANSfeR Award Program Announcement/Funding Opportunity is seeking research to determine whether the medical skill learned on a simulation system has a downstream beneficial effect to patients and/or the MHS in the real clinical world. The Program Announcement/Funding Opportunity seeks applications for research to demonstrate that simulation-based medical training has a measurable outcome on patient care. Previous T1 studies have shown improvement in skills in the simulated environment when deliberate practice and mastery learning (a set of group-based, individualized, learning strategies based on the belief that students will achieve a high level of understanding in a given area when given enough time) occur as part of training. The next set of studies should measure whether these same techniques translate to patient care and affect systems of care such as return-to-duty rates and morbidity and mortality statistics. Such research will involve taking the lessons learned in the laboratory and measuring outcomes in the patients who are cared for either in an operational environment or medical treatment facility. Historical patient outcome data does exist for the way medical professionals are trained now, so the variable being introduced in new studies would be simulation-based training.

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute helps people make informed healthcare decisions and improves healthcare delivery and outcomes by producing and promoting high-integrity evidence-based information that comes from research guided by patients, caregivers, and the broader healthcare community. PCORI currently is inviting Letters of Inquiry for its Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Awards program. Through the program, the institute will award grants of up to $250,000 over two years to projects that encourage active integration of patients, caregivers, clinicians, and other healthcare stakeholders as integral members of the patient-centered outcomes research/clinical effectiveness research (PCOR/CER) enterprise.

PCORI seeks to fund pragmatic clinical trials, large simple trials, or large-scale observational studies that compare two or more alternatives for addressing prevention, diagnosis, treatment, or management of a disease or symptom; improving healthcare system-level approaches to managing care; communicating or disseminating research results to patients, caregivers, or clinicians; or eliminating health or healthcare disparities. Proposed studies must address critical clinical choices faced by patients, their caregivers, clinicians, or delivery systems. They must involve broadly representative patient populations and be large enough to provide precise estimates of hypothesized effectiveness differences and to support evaluation of potential differences in treatment effectiveness in patient subgroups. PCORI's multi-stakeholder panels have identified 16 high-priority topics and research questions. (See PFA Appendix for list.) PCORI will give first consideration to applications that directly address one or more of the 16 PCORI identified topics. Note that PCORI is open to receiving and reviewing LOIs for studies on investigator-initiated CER questions as well. Note that this funding program does not support applications to conduct cost-effectiveness analyses, systematic reviews (with or without meta-analyses), or developing or evaluating shared decision-making or decision-support tools. In general, PCORI will not cover costs for interventions that are being compared in the proposed study. (See Appendix 3 in the Application Guidelines for details.) This announcement is a collaborative effort of PCORI's Comparative Clinical Effectiveness Research, Communication and Dissemination Research, Improving Healthcare Systems, and Addressing Disparities research programs.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ) mission is to produce evidence to make health care safer, higher quality, more accessible, equitable, and affordable, and to work within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and with other partners to make sure that the evidence is understood and used. AHRQ's Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (CQuIPS) is addressing patient safety and medication research by focusing on the safe usage of medications.  This perspective centers on how medications move through the health care system and how this systemic process can be improved so that patients are not harmed, while health care delivery is improved.  CQuIPS encourages the involvement of all members of the health care team, especially patients and families, nurses, pharmacists, technicians (pharmacy and medication administration technicians), health care administrators, risk managers, and physicians across all settings of care, including in the home. This FOA will fund investigative research demonstration projects that examine the effective implementation of processes, policies, and behaviors that support safe use of medication as well as its sustainment and dissemination.

PCORI seeks to fund pragmatic clinical trials, large simple trials, or large-scale observational studies that compare two or more alternatives for addressing prevention, diagnosis, treatment, or management of a disease or symptom; improving healthcare system-level approaches to managing care; communicating or disseminating research results to patients, caregivers, or clinicians; or eliminating health or healthcare disparities. Proposed studies must address critical clinical choices faced by patients, their caregivers, clinicians, or delivery systems. They must involve broadly representative patient populations and be large enough to provide precise estimates of hypothesized effectiveness differences and to support evaluation of potential differences in treatment effectiveness in patient subgroups.

The purpose of this funding opportunity announcement (FOA) is to invite applications for Clinical Centers (Hubs) in Strategies to Innovate EmeRgENcy Care Clinical Trials Network (SIREN).SIREN will enable conduct of high-quality, multi-site clinical trials to improve the outcomes for patients with neurologic, cardiac, respiratory, and hematologic, and trauma emergency events. SIREN will consist of one Clinical Coordinating Center (CCC), one Data Coordinating Center (DCC) and up to 10 clinical centers (Hubs). A Hub will typically be an academic center or tertiary referral center which will actively enroll patients into every clinical trial performed in SIREN, regardless of disease focus.A Hub will additionally provide scientific leadership and administrative oversight to its multiple satellite sites ("Spokes").Together the Hub and Spokes will provide access to a large and varying patient population for clinical trials. SIREN will implement a total of at least four large (1,000 patient) simple, pragmatic clinical trials in the emergency department and pre-hospital settings. The clinical trials will be meritorious, peerreviewed projects which will be awarded under separate funding announcements.

HIV-associated neurological disorders (HAND) persist in up to 50% of HIV-patients even when HIV replication is suppressed by combination antiretroviral therapy (cART), which transformed HIV/AIDS from a fatal illness into a chronically managed long-term condition. HIV does not infect neurons, but infects microglia and macrophages in the brain, causing HAND associated neuropathology. HAND epitomizes a series of disorders include Asymptomatic Neurocognitive Impairment (ANI), Mild Neurocognitive Disorder (MND), and HIV-Associated Dementia (HAD). These neurocognitive deficits interfere with psychomotor speed and coordination, diminishing memory and executive functions, and reduce quality of life in long-standing aviremic HIV-positive patients. These clinical challenges mandate research for a better understanding of HIV neuropathology; however, currently there are no effective approaches for HIV-infected live human brain studies or realistic HIV-infected animal models for HIV neuropathology. Proposed projects MUST include the following components. Applications which lack these three components will be considered non-responsive to the FOA and will not be reviewed. The major thrust of the project MUST involve exploitation of induced microglia and cerebral organoids generated from patient derived iPSC lines to better understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms of HIV-Associated Neurocognitive Disorder (HAND). At least one aim or sub-aim MUST also involve either 1. opioid, cannabinoid, methamphetamine, nicotinic, dopaminergic, or other signaling pathways relevant to addictive substance use, or 2. exposure to addictive substances, or 3. analysis of samples from patients that have used addictive substances or have SUDs.

The purpose of this U24 Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is to support a bioinformatics group (BIG) that will analyze a set of asthma-specific common data elements (CDEs) retrospectively collected from the electronic health record data (EHR) of patients in the US whose asthma is managed by a primary care provider (PCP). Based on a large, nationally representative data set, the BIG will identify the current management practices (CMPs) of PCPs that result in the best asthma outcomes for specific groups of patients in different clinical settings or situations. The CMPs will be established by the BIG in collaboration with a clinical consultant team (CCT) with expertise in asthma and a primary care network (PCN), experienced in managing the primary care of patients. Following the BIG's analysis of retrospective data, the CCT and PCN will design and then conduct prospective clinical trials to compare the retrospectively identified CMPs in appropriate patients with asthma. At the conclusion of the clinical trials, the BIG will perform the data analysis for the assessment of the CMPs, refining any of the processes needed to analyze the asthma CDE data.

The American College of Cardiology's Accreditation Services help hospitals improve care for patients with acute coronary syndromes, heart failure, and atrial fibrillation. In 2016, ACC merged with the Society of Cardiovascular Patient Care (SCPC), a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the care and outcomes of patients worldwide facing the same complications. To preserve the legacy of SCPC, an endowment was created to support future cardiovascular quality or performance improvement initiatives, particularly those that underscore the importance of accreditation. To advance that mission, ACCF is accepting proposals that support cardiovascular quality improvement of cardiovascular care and patient outcomes. Awards of up to $100,000 will support projects that contribute to the evidence base for accreditation; develop or evaluate cardiovascular quality initiatives that strengthen the accreditation process; provide opportunities for education that support quality or performance improvement projects; improve EMS systems of care in collaboration with community hospitals providing accreditation services; or provide public health education to improve community measures/outcomes related to early recognition of heart attack symptoms and appropriate action steps.

In 2015, NEA adopted a comprehensive strategic plan, the Roadmap to Advocacy, after extensive discussions with industry, patients, parents, and provider stakeholders. This plan places significant emphasis on understanding the overall burden of atopic dermatitis (AD), including the impact AD has on patients, families, the healthcare system, places of school and work, and society as a whole. NEA aims to become a steward of burden of disease research by serving as a clearinghouse for patient-centered data that can be readily shared with individuals and organizations interested in improving the lives of patients with eczema. NEA will ultimately utilize research on the burden of AD to further our mission to improve the health and quality of life for individuals with AD.

 This award is intended to provide support to conduct clinical studies at a clinical site with capability and patients samples to investigate potential biomarker (cMLC1) for trastuzumab-induced cardiotoxicity. 1) There will be an establishment of the assay to quantitatively measure cMLC-1 in humans.  2) Investigations will be conducted to determine the value of cMLC-1 in humans as an early predictor of cardiotoxicity in a pilot study. A comparison will be done of the level of cMLC-1 in 5 patients who subsequently developed cardiotoxicity and 5 patients who did not. Patients will be matched for age. Cardiotoxicity was defined using the Cardiac Review and Evaluation Committee for Trastuzumab (CREC) criteria as a decrease of more than 10% in the echocardiographic left ventricular ejection fraction to a value of less than 55%. 3) Women were monitored every 3 months for 15 months. 4) The archived plasma samples collected at multiple time points indicated below schematically will be tested for the biomarker cMLC-1 and for troponin I, an established marker for heart muscle damage as a control.  

The Rheumatology Research Foundation is issuing a notice of special interest (NOSI) to highlight the availability of funds for projects exploring the relationships between rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The Foundation accepts submissions within the following scientific categories: * Basic Science * Translational Science * Clinical Science * Health Services Research * Patient- or Practice-Centered Research Examples of studies relevant to this NOSI include, but are not limited to: * Immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 and pathogenesis of COVID-19 in patients with RMDs * Influence of DMARDs, biologic agents, or other medications, on SARS-CoV-2 immune responses * Studies of DMARDs or biologic agents used in RMDs on outcomes of SARS-CoV2 infection in animal models or in vitro * Epidemiology, clinical characteristics, and outcomes of CoVID-19 course in patients with RMDs, including the influence of therapeutic agents or other interventions in pragmatic trials * The effects of COVID-19 on access to rheumatology care, including telehealth, digital tools, social determinants of health, etc. * Analyses of the economic impact of COVID-19 on the care of patients with RMDs

One of JDRF's therapeutic goals is to restore beta cell function in type 1 diabetes (T1D) by replacement/transplantation of beta cells/islets. Pancreatic islet transplantation has been efficacious in selected patients in improving metabolic control and quality of life, and in preventing severe hypoglycemia in patients with medically unstable T1D. Despite improvements in cadaveric pancreas procurement, islet isolation, and islet purification, major scientific and technical challenges remain that must be addressed before beta cell replacement could be widely incorporated into the clinical management of established T1D; examples include serious side effects from chronic immunosuppression and the insufficient human islet supply from cadaveric pancreata. JDRF's role is to enable the scientific community to address these challenges with the ultimate goal of developing safe and effective beta cell replacement approaches available to large numbers of individuals with T1D.

One of JDRF's therapeutic goals is to restore beta cell function in type 1 diabetes (T1D) by replacement/transplantation of beta cells/islets. Pancreatic islet transplantation has been efficacious in selected patients in improving metabolic control and quality of life, and in preventing severe hypoglycemia in patients with medically unstable T1D. Despite improvements in cadaveric pancreas procurement, islet isolation, and islet purification, major scientific and technical challenges remain that must be addressed before beta cell replacement could be widely incorporated into the clinical management of established T1D; examples include serious side effects from chronic immunosuppression and the insufficient human islet supply from cadaveric pancreata. JDRF's role is to enable the scientific community to address these challenges with the ultimate goal of developing safe and effective beta cell replacement approaches available to large numbers of individuals with T1D.

The purpose of the NIH Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award (K23) is to support the career development of individuals with a clinical doctoral degree who have made a commitment to focus their research endeavors on patient-oriented research. This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is designed specifically for applicants proposing to serve as the lead investigator of an independent clinical trial, a clinical trial feasibility study, or a separate ancillary clinical trial, as part of their research and career development. Applicants not planning an independent clinical trial, or proposing to gain research experience in a clinical trial led by another investigator, must apply to companion FOA (XXXX).

The purpose of the NIH Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award (K23) is to support the career development of individuals with a clinical doctoral degree who have made a commitment to focus their research endeavors on patient-oriented research. This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is designed specifically for applicants proposing research that does not involve leading an independent clinical trial, a clinical trial feasibility study, or a separate ancillary clinical trial. Applicants to this FOA are permitted to propose research experience in a clinical trial led by a mentor or co-mentor. Applicants proposing a clinical trial or an ancillary clinical trial as lead investigator, should apply to the companion FOA (xxxxxx

The purpose of this Limited Competition is to extend the Cure Glomerulonephropathy (CureGN) Network by continuing to support the Participating Clinical Centers (PCCs). The CureGN Network is a multicenter observational cohort study of glomerular disease patients with the goal of improving care for all glomerular disease patients. The operational components of the study include four multi-site PCCs and a Data Coordinating Center (DCC). The CureGN Network, established in 2013, has recruited nearly 2,200 of 2,400 planned study participants and followed them with annual in-person clinic visits and interim telephone contacts. The CureGN PCCs will continue to follow-up previously enrolled participants. The PCCs will optimize retention strategies, developing novel methods for "remote" or "virtual" study participation; ensure complete and accurate data collection with a focus on clinical assessment of disease activity and outcomes; and participate in the development and validation of study-wide semi-quantitative assessment of histopathologic lesions. It is expected that a focus on disease features unique to glomerulonephropathy, and outcomes relevant to the full range of patient experience, combined with carefully curated clinical and biochemical data will uncover new predictors of the disease course, pathophysiologic processes, disease subtypes and novel treatment targets.The DCC provides key leadership functions for this study in the areas of study organization, study design and implementation, overall management, data management and analysis, and biosample management. The DCC requirements are described under a separate FOA.