Funding Opportunities

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) intends to release a Broad Pragmatic Studies (BPS) PCORI Funding Announcement (PFA) on Aug. 12, 2025, with the goal of funding patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER) projects. This preannouncement provides potential applicants additional time to identify collaborators; obtain patient, community and partner input on potential studies; and create responsive, high-quality proposals. PCORI seeks to fund patient-centered CER comparing two or more alternatives, each of which has established efficacy and/or is in widespread use. PCORI is interested in research that fills pertinent evidence gaps representing decisional dilemmas for patients, caregivers, clinicians, policy makers, and other healthcare system stakeholders, with a goal of generating evidence that helps patients and members of the broader health and healthcare community make informed decisions about their health care and health outcomes. Applicants are strongly encouraged to propose individual- or cluster-randomized controlled trials; however, well-specified natural experiments and well-designed observational studies will also be considered. Proposed studies should include an overall sample size that will allow precision in the estimation of hypothesized effect sizes and, as appropriate, analysis of heterogeneity of treatment effectiveness. Applicants are encouraged to pay special attention to issues of intervention implementation with an aim of facilitating widespread uptake of findings after completion of the study by utilizing hybrid effectiveness-implementation approaches. However, strict implementation or dissemination studies will not be considered responsive, nor will studies focused on the development of research methods. Applicants should propose well-justified and validated outcomes that are clinically meaningful and considered important by patients, and that can be impacted by the proposed interventions within the study duration. Applicants should consider, as appropriate, the full range of clinical and patient-centered outcomes data relevant to patients and other stakeholders. PCORI’s Principles for the Consideration of the Full Range of Outcomes Data in PCORI-Funded Research inform the expectations for applicants and the corresponding evaluation of applications submitted in response to this PFA.