DENVER, Colo. (May 22, 2012) — The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) today released its first primary research funding announcements to support comparative clinical effectiveness research that will give patients and those who care for them the ability to make better-informed health care decisions.

PCORI will award $120 million this year for innovative projects that effectively incorporate patients and stakeholders in research teams and address the areas of focus of PCORI’s National Priorities for Research and Research Agenda. PCORI previously announced the approval of 50 Pilot Project Program awards, totaling $30 million over two years, to researchers in 24 states and the District of Columbia. (more…)

The NLM Technical Bulletin recent announced a change which went into effect at the end of last week.

The Limits Page has been replaced by an easy-to-use Filters Sidebar. Similar to the way Limits worked, Filters will remain in effect, once selected, until they are cleared. The Filters Sidebar will not be visible until the search results are displayed, so this will require a slight change in searching habits for some. A new tutorial about Filters has been published on YouTube.

Another recent change to PubMed is the ability to click on an author name in a citation to execute a more relevant search. PubMed will search for the same author by comparing metadata for more precise results.

Your feedback on these and other changes to PubMed is welcome! Please use the “Write to the Help Desk” link at the bottom of every PubMed screen.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that USDA is accepting applications through the Community Connect Broadband program for grants to provide broadband service to residents of remote, rural communities.

“Ensuring that all Americans have access to reliable broadband is a key part of the Obama Administration’s effort to help create jobs and expand economic opportunities in rural areas,” Vilsack said. “These grants not only are critical for businesses and residents, they also help first responders, educators and health care professionals by providing them with access to broadband service.”

Information on available funding and application requirements are published on page 26241 of the May 3, 2012 Federal Register. More information on Community Connect Grants, including the application guide, can be viewed from the USDA Rural Development website. Applications must be received by June 18, 2012.

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies has made available a discussion paper, describing 10 attributes of a helath literate organization, to guide health care organizations that seek to ensure that everyone gets the greatest benefit possible from health care information and services. The authors are participants in  the Workgroup on Attributes of a Health Literate Organization of the IOM Roundtable on Health Literacy.

A PDF of the discussion paper is available free of charge.

A one-week intensive program on health literacy curriculum development and educational leadership for health professionals and educators will take place at the Tufts University School of Medicine campus in downtown Boston June 11-15, 2012. This course will teach participants to:

• Better understand health literacy as an organizational/systems problem that includes the skills of health care professionals and health care consumers
• Identify the knowledge, attitudes, skills, and systems changes currently employed, and needed to, improve health literacy at the individual and organizational level
• Identify audience-specific health literacy competencies and the curriculum content needed to address those competencies
• Write measurable health literacy learning objectives and an evaluation plan for improvement
• Outline a health literacy curriculum for use with health professional or adult learners based on sound adult learning theory and effective teaching strategies

For more information contact Sabrina Kurtz-Rossi, M.Ed., Course Director: sabrina.kurtz_rossi@tufts.edu.

Software developers can learn how to tap into free data covering drugs, medical literature, clinical trials, consumer health information, molecular biology and much more during a webinar on April 10, 2012 from 11am – 12:30pm Pacific time (noon Mountain, 10am Alaska). The free webinar is sponsored by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health.

NLM API Showcase will highlight the following NLM resources:

• E-utilities (providing access to PubMed/MEDLINE, genetic sequences and more)
• MedlinePlus, MedlinePlus Connect
• UMLS
• RXNorm
• ClinicalTrials.gov
• ChemSpell, DIRLINE, Pillbox
• Metamap, a medical text indexer

To learn how to attend via Adobe Connect webcast or video webcast visit http://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/api_webinar.html