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The Health Care Systems Research Network (HCSRN) kicked off the 2024 Annual Conference on April 9, 2024, in Milwaukee at the Hyatt Regency with nearly 275 participants from 19 HCSRN member institutions. This year, HCSRN attendees joined their colleagues to reconnect and network during the three-day conference featuring the theme, "Advancing High-Quality, Equitable Research in the Age of New Health Care Technologies.", (© 2024 Advocate Aurora Health, Inc.)

In April 2022, the Health Care Systems Research Network (HCSRN) - a consortium of 20 research institutions affiliated with large health systems spread across the United States (and one in Israel) - held its 28th annual conference in Pasadena, California, with 275 researchers, health care colleagues, and external academic partners in attendance. With a conference theme of "Promoting Collaboration and Partnerships to Advance Health Equity," the scientific program was assembled by a multisite planning committee with input from representatives of informal local host Kaiser Permanente Southern California. Objectives of the annual conference are to showcase scientific findings from HCSRN projects and to spur collaboration on research initiatives that improve health and health care for individuals and populations. To those ends, the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory sponsored a preconference workshop on the essentials of embedded pragmatic clinical trials, and more than a dozen scientific interest groups and active research project teams held ancillary sessions throughout the conference. This welcome opportunity for network members to meet in-person followed a 2-year hiatus necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which HCSRN conference proceedings were conducted through virtual and written communication platforms., (© 2022 Aurora Health Care, Inc.)

Purpose: While strategies to evaluate the influence of engaging patient partners in research, such as the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) WE-ENACT surveys, are beginning to emerge, a systematic set of measures for assessing the impact of patient engagement in research (PER) on study approaches and outcomes is lacking. This article describes a workshop and process used to identify and develop Critical Outcomes of Research Engagement (COREs). It proposes preliminary measures for assessing the impact of PER on the research process and outcomes of research studies., Methods: A group of 24 researchers and 5 patient partners participated in a PCORI-funded workshop designed to identify key research outcomes and corresponding measures to evaluate the impact of patient-engaged research on those outcomes. Interactive group discussion and synthesis by workshop attendees led to a proposed set of core components of patient-engaged research by each stage of a research study as well as some overarching principles. Postworkshop discussions further distilled the output and considered potential gaps., Results: CORE components identified were: patient-centered, meaningful, team collaboration, understandable, rigorous, adaptable/integrity, legitimate, feasible, ethical and transparent, timely, and sustainable. Existing measures skew more toward measuring the process of engagement and less toward measuring downstream outcomes of patient-partner engagement in all phases of research., Conclusions: Next steps include finalizing measures, pilot testing them with the workshop participants, and building a larger community of practice to further advance this work. The new community plans to create a measurement tool and conduct a study to validate the measures., Competing Interests: Conflicts of Interest None.