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Research teams usually decide on research agendas, or issues and questions to study in research projects, even when community stakeholder organizations, or CSOs, such as healthcare networks and patient organizations, are involved.

In this project, the research team explored a process for helping CSOs create research questions and set research agendas.

According to the World Health Organization, palliative care is "an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problems associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psycho-social and spiritual." The goal of the study was to generate comparative effectiveness research evidence to support the delivery of coordinated, community-based palliative care that effectively implements care plans consistent with the goals and preferences of older adults with advanced illness and their caregivers.

This study included a pragmatic, two-arm, multi-site randomized controlled trial of older adults (50+ years) with either poor prognosis cancer or end-stage organ failure who were recruited during an emergency department (ED) visit, along with their informal caregivers, to compare nurse-led telephonic case management to facilitated, outpatient specialty palliative care on: 1) quality of life in patients, 2) loneliness, 3) healthcare use in the 12 months following enrollment, 4) symptom burden, 5) caregiver strain, 6) caregiver quality of life, and 7) bereavement.

Medical studies usually focus on learning how a treatment works for most people. These studies have strict rules about who can take part. Patients with multiple health problems, such as high blood pressure and diabetes together, often can't take part because in such medical studies having multiple health problems can cause patients to respond differently to treatments than people with fewer health problems.

N-of-1 studies are a different way to design research. People with multiple health problems can take part in N-of-1 studies. An N-of-1 study has only one patient. Doctors try different treatments with that person and look for the treatment that works best. In this study, the research team wanted to know:

• Whether patients and doctors thought N-of-1 studies could be useful
• Which health problems patients thought N-of-1 studies could be helpful for
• Which features, such as the length of the study or how much time it took to track treatment results, affected whether patients wanted to be in an N-of-1 study

During the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine emerged as the primary method of providing outpatient care in many regions with shelter-in-place and social distancing policies. This study aimed understand the impact of this rapid and widespread transition from in-person to remote visits on disparities in access to primary care, especially in chronic disease where ongoing communication between providers and patients is essential.

The newly developed or expanded telemedicine programs varied widely, raising questions about the effect of these differences on uptake of telemedicine among different patient populations and on patient-centered outcomes. Leveraging a natural experiment approach, this study examined rapidly changing telemedicine and in-person models of care during and after the COVID-19 crisis to determine whether certain patients could safely choose to continue telemedicine or telemedicine-supplemented care, rather than return to in-person care.