10/25/2006 - Evanston Northwestern Healthcare’s Center for Outcomes Research and Education (CORE) has been awarded a $21 million “Toolbox Award” from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Richard Gershon, the Director of Psychometrics and Informatics at ENH is the principal investigator. The Toolbox Award is a five-year award from NIH, administered through the National Institute on Aging (NIA).
The $21 million Toolbox Award is the largest amount of money granted to an ENH Research Institute investigator and Dr. Gershon is the only recipient in the nation to receive the award.
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ENH Research Institute
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“This allows us to broaden the scope of instruments and research conducted by the Center on Outcomes, Research and Education,” said principal investigator, Dr. Gershon. “As a group we have primarily focused on health related quality of life instruments across a broad range of diseases, with particular focus in cancer and neurological disorders. This contract broadens that focus to include more performance variables.”
With the award, Dr. Gershon and his team of ENH Research Institute investigators are responsible for developing, locating and validating measurement tools for emotional, cognitive sensory and motor functions, with an emphasis on measuring outcomes in a clinical trial. The assessment will be sent back to NIH as a tool kit in September 2011.
It comes at a time when the
ENH Research Institute has been recently ranked #10 in the nation among Comprehensive Independent Research Hospitals in funding from the National Institutes of Health.
The toolbox will initially be used in epidemiological and longitudinal studies across the 15 institutes of NIH, which are also project sponsors. Dr.Gershon’s team has been contracted to field test for adults and may test for pediatrics in the future.
Dr. Gershon continues, “In the long run this should also produce easier, faster and less expensive ways for researchers to apply for and conduct research studies. For the average patient this may mean that clinical trials are completed more quickly bringing new treatments and drugs to the market in faster ways that can more easily be compared to existing or other new treatments under consideration.”
David Cella, PhD, Director of CORE is an investigator on Dr. Gershon’s team. He says, “We are the largest academically based outcomes measurement group in the country. Grants have been awarded for developing, validating, and equating quality of life instruments, as well as for implementing and assessing interventions aimed at improving quality of life. We are a very specialized focus research group.”
Dr. Cella has built an internationally prominent research program with an emphasis on outcomes measurement, particularly quality of life outcomes. The quality of life measurement system he created, The Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy (FACIT), is widely used in clinical trials and outcomes research.
ENH’s CORE has established itself as a national leader in the application of clinical research to improve patient care and influence policy. The research on outcomes and effectiveness evaluates how various treatment strategies affect results important to patients, including quality of life. This stimulates higher quality healthcare at a reasonable cost and creates multiple opportunities for extramurally-funded outcomes research.
CORE works locally with ENH surgeons to evaluate the speed of a patient’s recovery and their ability to return to their normal way of life.
The ENH Research Institute, founded in 1986, serves as the research arm of Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, a fully integrated, multi-hospital healthcare system serving northern metropolitan Chicago. Affiliation with Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and the university's basic sciences and biomedical engineering departments, creates a dynamic environment where the best and brightest clinical and scientific minds collaborate and innovate.
This project has been funded in whole or part with Federal funds from the National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No.: HHS-N-260-2006-00007-C