AHRQ plans $48 million in grants for patient registries

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality plans to make available in the fall details of grant opportunities worth $48 million for developing national patient registries for researching the long-term effects of treatment strategies and collecting data on under-represented populations.

Beside the patient registries, AHRQ plans grants and contracts amounting to $300 million in total for comparative effectiveness projects funded by the economic stimulus. Among the projects, the agency of the Health and Human Services Department will provide grants for a coordinated national effort to study and measure the treatment benefits in routine clinical practice. AHRQ will initially concentrate on 14 common conditions, including diabetes, obesity, and heart and blood vessel conditions.

The agency will also seek $74 million in contracts for analyzing and generating evidence and $19.5 million to establish an infrastructure for identifying treatment issues to review for comparative effectiveness and to involve the public.

AHRQ said in the recent announcement that it expects to begin funding the projects in spring 2010. Identifying what treatments are most successful for specific conditions should improve the quality of health care and reduce costs. Clinical registries, clinical data networks and other health IT can help providers generate or obtain outcomes data.