Evaluation of the PCORI Asthma Evidence to Action Network: Making the link between collaborative activities and use of findings by policy makers and clinicians

Community health planning and policy development often requires collaboration across multiple stakeholders.  Assessing the link between collaborative activities and actual systems change is a complex task.  This presentation will describe a process evaluation of the first year of the Asthma Evidence to Action Network (E2AN), a network funded by the Patient Center Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) that includes researchers, patients and other stakeholders and supports rapid dissemination of results to key end users (e.g., clinicians, payers, policy makers). 

The Asthma E2AN consists of 14 PCORI teams working on asthma-related studies, including projects to reduce racial/ethnic disparities.  The evaluation team employed mixed methods to describe baseline network characteristics, the process of network development and the early impact of activities.  The evaluation design included in-depth interviews with project team members, web surveys with researchers, patients and other stakeholders, and participant observation by the evaluation team.  Analyses included descriptive analyses by type of participant, qualitative thematic summaries, and social network analyses of connections across project teams.  

Baseline descriptions of the network demonstrated that existing collaborative connections and preferences for network activities varied widely.  A shared understanding of the goals of the network was still developing. Methodological challenges included synthesizing information across multiple data sources, capturing the complexity of network activities, and determining intermediate indicators of end user involvement.

Careful design of evaluations of networks can result in rich baseline and process evaluation data that can eventually help describe and assess pathways to effective use of research findings by key end users.