Background

The Center for Outcomes Research (COR) is based in the Department of Surgery of the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) in Worcester, Massachusetts, part of the University of Massachusetts 5-campus system. The medical school has 400 students and a full time faculty of approximately 600. A thriving center for research and clinical programs, UMMS receives over $100 million in research grants annually.

Since its inception in 1994, COR has served as the scientific coordinating center for a number of national and international outcomes registries, both privately and federally funded. The types of COR’s projects have varied from phase-IV post-marketing observational studies and randomized clinical intervention studies to quality of care initiative studies. COR’s responsibilities have included overall study design, maintaining patient and physician confidentiality, the design of data collection instruments, development of project and data management information systems, and the dissemination of study results through scientific publications and confidential benchmark reports. As of today, COR’s studies involve over 500,000 patients from 1,000 hospitals in 35 countries and have led to over 200 publications.

COR’s origin is the Worcester Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) Study, a five-year National Institute of Health supported R01 study which demonstrated that physicians are more likely to improve their patient management practices if they are provided with valid data on their own practices and outcomes along with regional and national benchmarks. Fred Anderson, PhD, principal investigator of the Worcester DVT Study and Research Professor of Surgery, turned the lessons of this study into the foundation of COR.

The COR team is dedicated to applying their expertise to research, quality of care initiatives, and educational projects that contribute to better patient care.