What would you do if you had $1 billion over 10 years and wanted to make a significant impact on health care delivery? At the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), this is the question we set out to answer when deciding how best to invest funds from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund, established under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010.
The trust fund—funded by a fee on specified health insurance plans and reauthorized for 10 years by Congress in 2020 (Pub Law 116-94) supports “patient-centered outcomes research” (PCOR) to create evidence for improving health and health care. The trust fund is divided between the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to conduct comparative effectiveness research (80%), the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation to invest in the Department of Health and Human Service’s data infrastructure (4%), and AHRQ (16%) to disseminate and implement PCOR evidence and train the next generation of PCOR researchers (16%).