At the 2010 AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting, CMTP staff partnered with Dr. Merrick Zwarenstein from the Sunnybrook Research Institute, Don Buesching from Eli Lilly, and Sarah Garner from the National Institutes for Health and Clinical Excellence to teach a pre-conference course on PCTs. The course began with an overview of the role of PCTs in comparative effectiveness research, reviewed a tool developed to assess the degree to which a trial is ‘pragmatic’ versus ‘explanatory’ and then explored specific case studies conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom in order to highlight key considerations for designing, conducting, and analyzing data from pragmatic trials. The objectives of the course were to:
- Understand the impetus for conducting pragmatic clinical trials
- Understand what they are (definitions)
- Learn how to identify a pragmatic trial when you see one by examining specific examples
- Learn about the unique analytical and operational issues they raise through case studies
- Learn about methods to deal with those issues (e.g., heterogeneity of treatment effects, adaptive trial design, techniques to improve the operational efficiency of trial design)
- Understand approaches being used by decision makers to promote more pragmatic study designs
For more information, contact Danielle Whicher.