Patient-Centeredness, Diversity, and Stakeholder Engagement

Amplifying Patient Voices

Patients are at the center of the PCORTF strategic framework. This placement signifies that AHRQ’s PCORTF work prioritizes patients and aims to amplify their voices to identify and tackle the issues most relevant to them. Patients are the experts on their own lives and how they experience health and healthcare. The multiple people at the center of the framework represent diverse experiences and perspectives that patients bring. AHRQ is committed to incorporating their expertise into PCORTF work to improve healthcare delivery, and ultimately to ensure equitable patient-centered care for all patients.

Engaging Diverse Stakeholders To Focus on Patient-Centered Care

The broader term “stakeholder” in the framework recognizes that the goal of patient-centered care requires and is affected by efforts across social networks and systems in which the patient is embedded. In addition to patients, AHRQ’s PCORTF stakeholders are broad and diverse. Stakeholders include family members and caregivers, patient advocates, community members and organizations, clinicians and support staff, health care provider organizations, health care improvement organizations, payers, policymakers, health information technology developers and vendors, researchers and academic research organizations, other funders of health services research, government and quasi-governmental partners, and others.

Sustained, Interactive, and Meaningful Engagement

The text in the framework below the patients reads: “Stakeholder engagement is sustained, interactive, and meaningful.” AHRQ intends to engage stakeholders repeatedly over time, with bidirectional communication, and in ways that feel meaningful to them. Stakeholder engagement has and will continue to inform all aspects of AHRQ’s PCORTF strategic planning and implementation. Examples of stakeholder engagement include participation in determining funding priorities; evaluating applications for grant funding; synthesizing evidence; designing and implementing clinical decision support and other evidence-based tools; disseminating and implementing PCOR evidence into practice; training researchers and healthcare professionals; and selecting metrics to evaluate success.

AHRQ will continue to improve our methods for stakeholder engagement and to look for new opportunities to do so across all PCORTF activities. For example, AHRQ will increase its support for implementation strategies that use participatory approaches that foster genuine partnerships between implementers and the communities intended to benefit from implementation of evidence-based practices. Communities can be defined in social, economic, or geographic terms, such as patient communities, racial/ethnic communities, percent of the population living below the Federal poverty level, or residents of an urban or rural neighborhood. Stakeholder engagement can help define appropriate community representatives to include in the work.