The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the lead federal agency for health services research, receives less than one percent of funding compared to what the National Institutes of Health receives – and now even that one percent is being dismantled.
In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, AcademyHealth President and CEO Aaron Caroll highlights the impact of underinvesting in the field that turns research into action. The piece opens with a tragic example from a researcher and pediatrician, Dr. Suchitra Rao, who had a patient with co-existing health conditions and was shuffled from specialist to specialist, pass away after the routine delivery of his yearly flu vaccine was missed by his providers.
Dr. Rao built her research to address this gap between medical discovery and delivery. With funding from the agency, she created a randomized controlled trial across 11 health systems to test whether hospitals could reliably identify high-risk children and vaccinate them against the flu before sending them home, rather than counting on busy outpatient care. This study was in its third year out of five when it was abruptly halted as part of the more than 100 AHRQ grant cancellations issued by the federal government this past July.
The op-ed details another study designed to empower parents and help reduce medical errors for their children, as well as a study regarding limiting unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions for patients being discharged from the hospital. Learn more about other cancelled grants in AcademyHealth’s tracker here.
This isn’t just about what the interrupted research could have meant for patients and the future of care delivery. It’s also about how the work put into the in-progress studies can never be recovered.
As Caroll writes, “Stopping a study midway doesn’t make the question disappear. It means we may never get the answer, even after taxpayers have paid millions toward finding it.”
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