Making Pragmatic Trials Pragmatic in Post-acute and Long-term Care Settings

The paper intriguingly titled “The Answer Is 17 Years, What Is the Question: Understanding Time Lags in Translational Research” affirms that the path from basic research, to human research, to clinical research, to guidelines, and eventually to practice, is roughly a 17-year journey1—for those few research discoveries that even make it to the finish line. It's no surprise, then, that the National Institutes of Health promote the NIH Stage Model to guide research from stage 0 (basic research) through stage V (implementation and dissemination), a critical step being stage IV (effectiveness), during which pragmatic trials are implemented and evaluated.