JANUARY 20, 2017 BY KATHLEEN M. MCTIGUE

General Update

Heather Coulter, M. Ed. (standing) leads a discussion at PaTH’s Stakeholder Engagement meeting at Temple University.

Greetings! The PaTH team is welcoming 2017 with a flurry of good news – all six of our network’s DataMarts are fully operational, having passed the second round of PCORnet “Data Characterization” – a process in which they are assessed along certain data quality measurements. This is great news for PaTH, as it means that all of our sites are now able to respond to PCORnet queries.

PaTH is now supporting nine studies, as well as four research proposals currently in review. Here are just a couple of recent highlights…the INVESTED study just completed its “vanguard” year – investigators across the US and Canada, including PaTH-affiliated teams at the University of Pittsburgh and University of Utah, recruited patients into a randomized trial that aims to see whether high-dose influenza vaccine can prevent cardiopulmonary events in a high-risk population. The ADAPTABLE study, which examines how different aspirin doses can prevent strokes and heart attacks in people living with heart disease, has enrolled 196 patients from Temple, UPMC and University of Utah health systems, and we are delighted that recruitment will soon begin at Johns Hopkins as well. As detailed below, the PCORnet Bariatric Study is currently examining data from over 63,000 patients nationwide to see how weight loss varies across three common bariatric procedures. So PaTH and PCORnet are well on their way to producing knowledge that doctors and patients can use to help improve health and healthcare decisions. For details on the other studies that PaTH supports, please check out our website pathnetwork.org/Research/.

PaTH has continued its stakeholder work with an in-person meeting focusing on engagement efforts (see below) and ongoing work with the patient partners who are engaged with each of the three PaTH research cohorts. Furthermore, our "Story Booth" initiative has collected 99 patient stories – and the in-person booth is readying to move to Penn State to collect stories from patients in the Hershey, PA region. Our preliminary feedback suggests that patients have found this project to be worthwhile, so we are looking forward to expanding its scope.

Finally, as this newsletter is headed to press, our teams are preparing to gather in Utah for a bi-annual Steering Committee meeting. These opportunities to assemble and reflect on progress towards our goals are invaluable, providing the luxury of eye contact and facial expressions that our more typical conference calls don’t allow, a chance to to sort through complicated logistics, and even time for an occasional joke! We look forward to the opportunity to consider all the disparate pieces of our work as a whole, to appreciate the incredible team that we work with, and to strategize for how best to reach our aim of supporting patient-centered research that will enable patients, caregivers, and clinicians to make the decisions that are right for their health.

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