PCORI releases methodology standards

The Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute released a draft list of standards for conducting comparative-effectiveness research that will eventually be used to score and evaluate applications for funding. The document contains 60 standards divided across 11 broad areas, including formulating research questions, prioritizing research, preventing and handling missing data, designing adaptive trials, analyzing heterogeneity of treatment effect, creating data registries, and studying diagnostics.

The standards, which do not focus on any specific disease areas, include recommendations to measure outcomes such as survival, symptoms or quality of life. The list also emphasizes that studies should use patient-reported outcome measures. ...