AHRQ Community Forum

The purpose of the AHRQ Community Forum, funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), is to improve and expand public and stakeholder engagement in research supported by AHRQ’s Effective Health Care Program.  Community Forum activities seek to:

1. Build on existing efforts to involve stakeholders— clinicians, patients, caregivers, health services researchers, health care payers, and others—having a specific interest in AHRQ’s EHC Program research.
2. Advance the science for obtaining input from both stakeholders and the general public in the development and dissemination of health care research.

Community Forum updates and materials are posted to the Resources for Getting Involved and Involving Others page as they become available.

Stakeholder Input

AHRQ engages stakeholders at all stages of research to ensure that the EHC Program addresses relevant and important issues, and that findings are used to support evidence-based health care. Stakeholders contribute by:

• Nominating topics.
• Commenting on draft research questions and reports.
• Guiding and participating in the dissemination of EHC Program research.

The Agency convenes stakeholder groups comprised of clinicians, payers, patient representatives, and researchers to assist with specific projects; a formal panel, the Effective Health Care (EHC) Stakeholder Group, provides perspectives on broad program elements.

Community Forum stakeholder activities include:

1. Identifying and describing innovative practices for AHRQ and others to use to engage patients, clinicians and other stakeholders in research.
2. Building support for patient and consumer involvement in comparative effectiveness research.
3. Outreach to engage key clinician groups more actively in the EHC Program, including the AHRQ Evidence-Based Care (EBC) Challenge for Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants practicing in retail settings.
4. Developing tools and resources to support patients, consumers, clinicians and others to provide input to EHC Program research.

Public Input

The Community Forum will help the EHC Program to identify more systematic and effective approaches for obtaining public views to inform its work. This initiative will focus on deliberative methods, public consultation approaches well suited for exploring complex questions because they allow participants to:

• Learn in depth about topics under consideration.
• Explore various perspectives.
• Refine their views before coming to a final opinion.

The Community Forum will develop, demonstrate, and evaluate five types of deliberative methods. The approaches used will vary in the length and number of sessions participants attend and in their reliance on technology to support or facilitate discussion among participants. Overall, the demonstrations will convene nearly 100 groups and an estimated 1,200 participants. These groups will include members of AHRQ priority populations, including Hispanics, African-American women, the elderly, and rural residents. Participants will deliberate on the use of evidence in healthcare decision-making.

The Community Forum deliberative methods study will be the most comprehensive evaluation of these methods to date. It will advance the state of the art in deliberative methodology, assessing the strengths, weaknesses, costs, and feasibility of various approaches. AHRQ will be able to use the findings to broaden public input into its programs, as well as to gain insights on fundamental questions that will enhance the value of its research products.

The Community Forum team is led by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), a behavioral and social science research firm. Organizational partners include the Center for Medical Technology Policy, the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University, AcademyHealth, the Center for Healthcare Decisions, and Consumers’ Union.