Annual Report

2024 Annual Report — 34^th Anniversary

Under About, please change the first paragraph to: The Outcomes Research Consortium was formed in 1990 at the University of California in San Francisco. The Consortium has about 230 investigators in twenty countries including the Austria, Canada, China, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Poland, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States. The Consortium is non-profit; its only goal is thus participation in high-quality research.

The Consortium’s administrative center moved from San Francisco to the University of Louisville in March of 2000 where it was hosted in the Outcomes Research Institute. In 2005, the Consortium moved to the Cleveland Clinic and was hosted in the Department of Outcomes Research. As of 2024, the Consortium is headquartered in the Center for Outcomes Research at UTHealth in Houston.

The Consortium has published more than 2,150 full papers and more than 120 editorials. The collaboration publishes a full paper or editorial every other day.

The Consortium is currently involved in about 150 clinical studies, including many large multi-center outcome trials. Funding for the Consortium’s funding is from various peer-reviewed granting agencies, and we also collaborate with companies that make innovative devices and drugs, often conducting major trials that lead to regulatory certification. The Consortium facilitates scientific exchange and collaboration necessary for technically complex outcomes studies involving hundreds or thousands of patients. Additional information is available at www.OR.org.

Aspirations

Outcomes research seeks to understand the end results of particular health care practices and interventions. End results include effects that people experience and care about, such as change in the ability to function. In particular, for individuals with chronic conditions—where cure is not always possible—end results include quality of life as well as mortality. By linking the care people get to the outcomes they experience, outcomes research has become the key to developing better ways to monitor and improve the quality of care.

The general goal of the Outcomes Research Consortium is to evaluate inexpensive, low-risk interventions that are easy to implement yet likely to markedly improve outcome. For example, we have shown that simply maintaining intraoperative normothermia markedly reduces the risk of complications — and does so at trivial cost. A consequence of our work is that active intraoperative warming has become routine, whereas it was previously rare. Current focus areas include cardiovascular complications, postoperative delirium, and management of acute surgical pain.

Mission

Be the world’s leading clinical anesthesia research organization.

Behaviors

1. Publish more high-impact, peer-reviewed clinical research papers (quantified as number times impact) than any other perioperative organization.
2. Recruit more extra-mural clinical research funding than any other anesthesia organization, with “clinical research” being defined as research conducted with human subjects.
3. Train clinical investigators at all levels.