NIH gets help raising awareness for PMI national cohort

All of Us research program enlists 14 national community groups and provider associations to encourage Americans to contribute their health data to the study.


The National Institutes of Health’s All of Us research program, the cornerstone of its Precision Medicine Initiative, is getting assistance from 14 national community groups and provider associations to help encourage a million or more Americans to contribute their health data to the national cohort.

The organizations, which include the American Academy of Family Physicians, American Medical Association and National Hispanic Medical Association, will receive a combined $1 million to raise awareness and educate their constituents about the importance of getting participants for the longitudinal study to contribute their physical, genomic and electronic health record data.

“We want to build long-term relationships with our participants based on transparency and trust. These organizations will help us in that effort,” said Eric Dishman, director of the All of Us Research Program at NIH. “We will look to them for input about what their communities want and need, as we work to create a research program that’s meaningful for researchers and participants alike.”

In addition to providing blood and urine samples as well as access to EHRs, the project will collect participant information through mobile technology, physical measurements and surveys. According to NIH, the goal is to create one of the largest and most diverse datasets of its kind for health research.

The All of Us program, which is currently in a beta phase, is also leveraging a national network of healthcare provider organizations—including regional medical centers, community health centers and Department of Veterans Affairs’ medical centers—to get the consent of participants and to gather health information such as EHRs.

Also See: Providers awarded $13.8M to recruit PMI cohort participants

In June, NIH announced that it had begun enrolling the All of Us program’s first participants as beta testers and that the agency was “starting small with enrollment and scaling up carefully” from one site to more than 100 sites nationally during the beta phase.

Currently, enrollment in the program is by invitation only. However, the national launch of the All of Us program is slated for the spring of 2018.

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