Nih Pathways to Prevention Program: Weighing the Evidence, Identifying Research Gaps, and Evaluating Outputs of a Prevention Research Agenda

INTRODUCTION: Through its Pathways to Prevention (P2P) program, the NIH Office of Disease Prevention (ODP) hosts workshops that identify research gaps in a selected area of prevention science, suggest research needs, and develop an action plan for moving the field forward through an unbiased, evidence-based assessment of a complex public health issue. ODP has convened seven P2P workshops on the following topics: Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (2012), Opioids and Chronic Pain (2014), Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (2014), Total Worker Health® (2015), Youth Suicide Prevention (2016), Methods for Evaluating Natural Experiments in Obesity (2017), and Appropriate Drug Therapies for Osteoporotic Fracture Prevention (2018). Each workshop includes the publication of a systematic evidence review and a report that summarizes recommendations from an unbiased, independent, multidisciplinary panel of experts. Disseminating prevention research gaps and implementing panel recommendations have the potential to impact the field through an enhanced research agenda and strategies for improved public health.

METHODS: Our team conducted an evaluation of outputs from completed P2P workshops to understand the impact the program has had on the research fields addressed by the workshops. We examined the recommendations from each workshop and categorized those that had a dissemination and implementation research focus. Where available (reports published prior to 2015), we obtained relative citation ratios (RCRs) for the published systematic evidence review and panel reports of these workshops.

RESULTS: Five of the ten Youth Suicide Prevention workshop recommendations have a dissemination and implementation research focus, such as the need to implement standardized measures for identifying individuals at high-risk for suicide. As another example, the Opioids and Chronic Pain panel report called for better dissemination and implementation research in three of its nine recommendations; the RCR for this report indicates that it has eight times the number of citations compared with the average paper in this field. However, uptake of these recommendations by the research community is not as strong as it could be.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PREVENTION RESEARCH: Presentation content will serve as a resource for prevention researchers by informing them of research gaps identified from the seven completed P2P workshops. Our goal is to enhance dissemination and implementation of recommendations and foster new prevention research ideas and activities among a broad array of investigators so that progress can be made in these important public health and biomedical areas.