Lauren McCormack selected to serve as member of PCORI Advisory Panel on Communication and Dissemination Research

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC – Lauren McCormack, Ph.D., director of Center for Communication Science at RTI International, was selected to serve as co-chair of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) Advisory Panel on Communication and Dissemination Research. 

PCORI is an independent, non-profit non-governmental organization authorized by Congress to fund research that will provide patients, their caregivers and clinicians with the evidence-based information needed to make better-informed healthcare decisions.

Members of the advisory panel identify critical research questions and advise about funding patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research and disseminating the results in ways that patients, clinicians, insurers and other users will find useful and valuable.  

McCormack will apply her experience with strategies that translate clinical and scientific data to help people make more informed decisions. 

"I am looking forward to contributing to the panel and helping to advance communication and dissemination science," McCormack said. "This kind of research can help people understand important trade-offs between risks and benefits of choices and uncertainties associated with the evidence base."

McCormack and colleagues in RTI's Center for Communication Science develop, implement and evaluate interventions to promote informed decision making and behavior change.  

"People are often challenged when presented with complex information and find it difficult to use when making decisions," McCormack said. "Our Center strives to improve the information exchange among scientists and the public, patients, providers and policy makers to bridge the gap between those who have information and those who might benefit from it." 

McCormack is also an adjunct associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition, in 2013, she led a systematic review of the literature for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that focused on examining the comparative effectiveness of strategies to communicate and disseminate evidence-based information. 

With funding from PCORI, she and colleagues are developing survey-based measures of patient-entered communication that can be used as metrics in many PCOR/CER studies.