Understanding patient and consumer perspectives of research evidence is critical to engaging them in meaningful partnerships that produce actionable research findings that they can in turn use in partnership with health professionals to improve their own health and the healthcare system as a whole.

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Patients, caregivers and clinicians are interested in research roles that emphasize usefulness and understandability of research.

Efforts to engage patients and consumers in comparative effectiveness research (CER) in the USA are still in the early stages, and the outcomes of these partnerships have yet to be fully understood or realized. Our work assisting federal agencies and national organizations who engage patients and consumers in CER reveal three unresolved tensions around the representation of the patient experience in the research process, the culture of research and capacity to partner with patients and consumers, and the conflict between the methodological approaches to CER and the outcomes of interest to patients and caregivers. Several approaches to address these tensions have emerged, yet resolving these tensions will require addressing many system-level challenges and building an evidence base for consumer engagement in CER.

There is a significant opportunity for researchers to engage patients and caregivers as partners in CER. Researchers recognize the need for additional training and expertise to leverage those opportunities.