The Missouri Orthopaedic Institute has been approved for a $300,000 funding award through the Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Awards program, an initiative of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). The funds will support a project to engage patients and their caregivers in shaping future research focused on severe limb injuries.
Led by Dr. Bryce Rizvanovic and Dr. Lisa Royse, the project team will develop and launch the Research Engagement for Better Understanding in Limb Decision-Making (REBUILD) Program in collaboration with Dr. Daniel London, Dr. Julia Nuelle, Dr. Kyle Schweser, Dr. Victoria Shaffer, and Dr. David Mehr, as well as two patients who will help ensure the patient perspective is integrated into program activities.
Across the two-year project period, the team will establish infrastructure and partnerships to support meaningful and sustained engagement of patients and caregivers in patient-centered comparative effectiveness research (CER) related to limb optimization, including decision-making around treatments to try to save a limb versus amputate.
“Patients facing complex limb injuries are often required to make high-stakes decisions under significant uncertainty, with long-term implications for function, quality of life, and identity,” said Dr. Rizvanovic. “Despite this, their perspectives are rarely integrated early enough to shape the research that informs these decisions. REBUILD is designed to change that by embedding patients as partners in defining research priorities and guiding future comparative effectiveness research in limb optimization.”
REBUILD will include a Patient Advisor Team composed of patients and caregivers with lived experience who will identify and prioritize patient-centered research questions, collaborate with researchers to inform study designs and implementation, and support dissemination of research findings to broader patient and community audiences.
This work is further supported by the Patient-Centered Orthopaedic Research and Engagement (P-CORE) Program and the Mizzou Limb Preservation Program. REBUILD builds on prior successful patient engagement initiatives at MOI, including the PARTNORS program that established foundational infrastructure for integrating patient voices into orthopaedic research.
By expanding these efforts to a new clinical population and decision context, REBUILD advances MOI’s commitment to embedding patients as partners across the full research lifecycle and scaling engagement efforts to address complex, high-stakes treatment decisions.
The REBUILD program is part of a portfolio of projects funded by PCORI to help develop a community of patients, caregivers, clinicians and other stakeholders who are better equipped to engage as partners in all phases of patient-centered CER and to disseminate results of PCORI-funded studies.
PCORI is nonprofit organization with a mission to fund research designed to provide patients, their caregivers, and clinicians with the evidence-based information needed to make better-informed healthcare decisions.
