Our mission is to catalyze interventional research that improves care for people receiving post-acute and long-term care.
We partner with innovators, researchers, and healthcare providers to use real-world pragmatic methods that accelerate testing interventions and translating findings into practice.
We leverage our expertise, big data, and provider networks when conducting research and expanding national capacity through training and infrastructure grants.
Our vision is to:
While we conduct research and expand national capacity in all care settings, we aim to be a national leader in pragmatic research in settings that provide post-acute and long-term care services and supports.
These settings are at the heart of our researchers’ expertise and where we have particularly rich big data and relationships, including national research networks.
Moving along a continuum similar to the NIH’s Stage Model for Behavioral Intervention Development, we obtain grant funding to test promising interventions.
Whenever possible, our gold standard involves pragmatic methods: where provider staff, instead of researchers, implement interventions and we evaluate outcomes using existing data. This means we are testing interventions under the real-world conditions in which providers operate and conducting projects as efficiently as possible.
We use the Readiness Assessment Model for Pragmatic Trials (RAPT) model, which we developed, to engage our partners, continually refining our strategies based on what we learn, and to inform how we prepare for full-scale pragmatic trials.
We want our research to reach providers; our interventions to be packaged in ways that can be easily replicated; and our results to change practice.
This means not only publishing in the peer-reviewed literature, but also thinking broadly and creatively about how we connect researchers with providers, policymakers, and other stakeholders to share effective interventions and encourage uptake.