In an interview at the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory Steering Committee meeting in April, Drs. Robin Boineau and Helene Langevin discussed the impact of the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory on research across the NIH.
“The NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory really has been a fertile ground across NIH,” said Boineau, who is the director of the Office of Clinical and Regulatory Affairs at the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH). “It was funded by the Common Fund as an incubator type of research project to see if you can take an idea, expand it, and many Institutes and Centers saw how this could be really effective for their different studies.”
The success of the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory inspired the launch of similar programs at the NIH, such as the NIA IMPACT Collaboratory, which is focused on transforming the delivery of dementia care, and the Pain Management Collaboratory, which is comprised of 11 pragmatic clinical trials studying nonpharmacological approaches for the management of pain and common co-occurring conditions in military and veterans healthcare systems.
Another area where the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory has had a significant impact is pain and the opioid crisis. The NIH Collaboratory Coordinating Center serves as the Resource Coordinating Center for the PRISM program (Pragmatic and Implementation Studies for the Management of Pain to Reduce Opioid Prescribing) program, a component of the NIH’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative.
“We know there’s a large gap between the implementation of findings when the efficacy studies come out and when they show up in the clinical guidelines,” said Langevin, who is the director of NCCIH. “We really need studies that bridge that gap, and the HEAL Initiative was needed to address that on an urgent basis because of this incredible crisis we were facing with opioid overdoses. The HEAL Initiative benefited greatly from the experience of the Collaboratory in the creation of the PRISM program.”
The PRISM NIH Collaboratory Trials are studying the real-world effectiveness of nonpharmacologic interventions for pain and assessing the implementation of these interventions to improve pain management and reduce reliance on opioids.
“The NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory has been really fearless in this area of approaching problems that seem complicated and difficult. The Coordinating Center is so excellent in solving those problems and making sure that the research is done in a very rigorous way,” Langevin said.
See the complete materials from the 2022 Steering Committee meeting.
