Home
Tools and Resources
Resources for Getting Involved and Involving Others

Resources for Getting Involved and Involving Others

The Effective Health Care (EHC) Program seeks the involvement of a wide range of stakeholders throughout the research process. AHRQ firmly believes that involving stakeholders from the beginning improves research results, and helps ensure that findings are relevant to users’ distinct concerns and have applications in real-world situations. This page links to resources for getting involved in the EHC Program, resources to help researchers involve patients, consumers, and others stakeholders, and ongoing work on methods for public and stakeholder engagement. Many of these resources have been developed by the AHRQ Community Forum.

Get Involved
Involve Others
Deliberative Methods for Public Engagement

Get Involved

How To Get Involved in the Effective Health Care Program: A Concise Guide for Stakeholders

This brief guide (PDF, 1.5 MB) highlights opportunities for taking part in the Effective Health Care Program. You can find out how to get involved and what you can expect throughout the process. This information is also summarized in the following brochures: Opportunities for Involvement (PDF, 233 kB); Life of a Topic (PDF, 229 kB).

In addition, you can use the following links to:

Suggest a topic for researchers to study.
Make comments on the key questions that researchers plan to ask in a study.
Make comments on the draft reports before the researchers publish them.
Submit scientific information packets to researchers. These packets provide detailed information related to the specific comparative effectiveness research questions.
Contact us to suggest research priorities or to volunteer to help researchers refine research ideas, develop a research approach or shape research products and tools.
Use our research summaries and other materials and recommend them to others
Share your success stories using EHC Program Research, Products, and Tools.

The AHRQ Evidence-Based Care (EBC) Challenge

The EBC Challenge involves Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants in integrating AHRQ’s research products in their convenience healthcare practice. Teams compete in translating AHRQ research reports into innovative, provider-friendly resources that can be easily adopted in retail settings.

Involve Others

Tools

Learning Modules: Engaging Stakeholders in the Effective Health Care Program
This set of four learning modules provides researchers with information and tools for engaging a broad range of stakeholders in the Effective Health Care Program.

The Facilitation Primer: Strategies, Tools and Resources to Get You Started
This introduction (PDF, 463 kB) to meeting facilitation focuses on how to work with diverse stakeholder groups. It includes planning and preparation, and ways to address specific challenges facilitators may face during a meeting.

Table: Engaging Stakeholders to Identify and Prioritize Topics for Future Research
This table (PDF, 133 kB) summarizes recommended activities for researchers who wish to involve stakeholders in efforts to identify and prioritize topics for future research. It can be used as a planning guide or reporting checklist.

Patients and Consumers

Summary: Supporting Patient and Consumer Involvement in Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Workshop
This summary (PDF, 687 kB) of a July 13, 2011 panel presents techniques and resources to identify patient and consumer representatives to contribute to all phases of research; ways to provide support and training to facilitate their involvement throughout the process; and strategies for partnering with patients and consumers in the translation and dissemination of research products.

Webcast: Insights from Patients and Consumers Involved in Research
In this webcast of October 13, 2011, presenters discuss techniques and resources to involve patient and consumer representatives in all phases of research.

Online Course: Understanding Evidence-based Healthcare: A Foundation for Action
This web course is designed to help consumer advocates understand the fundamentals of evidence-based healthcare concepts and skills. Funded by AHRQ, the course was created by United States Cochrane Center as part of a project undertaken by Consumers United for Evidence-based Healthcare (CUE). Registration is free of charge.

Innovative Approaches for Engaging Stakeholders

Summary: Innovations in Stakeholder Engagement Conference
This report (PDF, 473 kB) describes presentations from the October 21, 2011 Innovations in Stakeholder Engagement Conference on topics including ways to use social media such as online communities, and implementing engagement techniques such as grassroots organizing and collaborative research methods.

Webcast: Innovations in Stakeholder Engagement Conference
In this webcast of October 21, 2011, presenters from public and private organizations describe promising technologies, activities, and other innovative approaches they have used to involve patients, consumers, clinicians and communities in their work.

Literature Review: Innovative Methods in Stakeholder Engagement: An Environmental Scan
This literature review (PDF, 524 kB) presents a summary of the state of the art in methods that organizations use to involve stakeholders – patients, consumers, practicing clinicians, payers, and others – in health care research and activities in related fields. Its objective is to identify strategies to enhance stakeholder involvement in AHRQ’s Effective Health Care Program and other health care research activities.

Webcast: Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Techniques to Integrate Stakeholder Preferences in Comparative Effectiveness Research
The webcast from August 27, 2012 introduces the conceptual basis for multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and describes how two preference elicitation techniques, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Conjoint Analysis (CA), can be used to incorporate stakeholder preferences in comparative effectiveness research.

Deliberative Methods for Public Engagement

Slide Presentation: Using Deliberative Methods to Engage Patients, Consumers, and the Public
These slides from a December 6, 2011 webinar discuss the use of deliberative methods to elicit the views of patients, consumers, caregivers, or other members of the community concerning health policy and healthcare issues. Topics include how deliberative methods vary from more traditional methods of obtaining public views, defining features of deliberative methods, and issues that are appropriate for deliberation.

Webcast: Using Deliberative Methods to Engage the Public: How to Design and Implement an Effective Deliberative Session
This “how-to” webinar from April 19, 2012 provides practical guidance for those interested in using deliberative methods for obtaining meaningful public input to inform their work. The webinar covers setting clear goals for a deliberative session, recruitment, design, developing educational materials, facilitation, and synthesizing outputs.