In May 2002, the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) convened a series of meetings to chart a "roadmap" for medical research in the 21st century. The purpose of the NIH Roadmap is to identify major opportunities and gaps in biomedical research that no single Institute could tackle alone but that NIH as a whole must address to make the biggest impact on the progress of medical research. The ultimate goal of the Roadmap is to catalyze changes that are necessary for transforming new scientific knowledge into tangible benefits for people. Developed with input from meetings with more than 300 leaders in academia, industry, Government, and the public, the Roadmap provides a framework of priorities for optimizing the NIH research portfolio. It lays out a vision for a more efficient and productive system of medical research and identifies the most compelling opportunities in three areas: New Pathways to Discovery, Research Teams of the Future, and Re-engineering the Clinical Research Enterprise.

The theme of New Pathways of Discovery addresses the need to advance our understanding of complex biological systems and to build a better "toolbox" for medical research in the 21st century by providing wide access to technologies, databases, and other scientific resources that are more sensitive, robust, and easily adaptable to researchers' individual needs. The Research Teams of the Future seeks to encourage scientists to test alternative models for conducting research, including taking on unexplored avenues of research that carry a high potential for failure but also a greater chance for groundbreaking discoveries; stimulating new ways of combining skills and disciplines in the physical and biological sciences; and encouraging novel partnerships, such as those between the public and private sectors, to accelerate the movement of scientific discoveries from bench to bedside. Re-engineering the Clinical Research Enterprise is designed to accelerate and strengthen the clinical research process by adopting a systematic infrastructure to serve the field of scientific discovery better and more efficiently.

One of the programs within the Re-engineering the Clinical Research Enterprise initiative involves the Dynamic Assessment of Patient-Reported Chronic Disease Outcomes. In support of this initiative, in September 2004, the NIH initiated a multicenter cooperative group, referred to as the Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS). The PROMIS network of clinicians, clinical researchers, and measurement experts is organized around six primary research sites—Duke University, Stanford University, Stony Brook University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Pittsburgh, and University of Washington—and a Statistical Coordinating Center (CORE, Evanston Northwestern Healthcare and Northwestern University). PROMIS will contribute to that reengineering by building and validating common, accessible item banks to measure key symptoms and health concepts applicable to a range of chronic conditions, enabling efficient and interpretable clinical trial research and clinical practice application of patient-reported outcomes.

For more information about the NIH Roadmap, please visit the Web site at http://www.nihroadmap.nih.gov.