Career Center

Chief Planning & Evaluation Officer

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) is committed to being a learning organization, ensuring our research agenda and other activities reflect stakeholder input and advance our National Priorities for Health. As Chief Planning and Evaluation Officer, you will serve as a key advisor on the Senior Leadership Team and report to the Deputy Executive Director for Strategy, Planning & Outreach, a component of the Executive Office. Your primary areas of functional oversight include strategic planning and implementation, organizational learning and evaluation, and research outreach, communications, and policy. You will lead a growing division that includes our Evaluation & Analysis and will continue to develop our planning, policy, and outreach team and its work streams (a total of approximately 20 staff).

PCORI is the leading funder of patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research in the US. We are seeking an established leader able to design and implement organizational and program evaluations across multiple functional areas pertaining to PCORI’s portfolio and mission. Your work will further our commitment to tackling the nation's most important health and healthcare challenges with a holistic approach to generating and promoting evidence that can lead to a more patient-centered system of health.

How You’ll Make an Impact  

Your leadership will be integral to implementing our 2022 strategic plan, evolving our research agenda, sharing with stakeholders how well we are meeting our goals, and demonstrating the value of our work.

• Collaborate across PCORI to foster and enable a learning culture that prioritizes continuous evaluation, learning, and improvement in PCORI activities.
• Contribute to organizational and programmatic strategic planning, decision-making, and communication with key audiences by analyzing progress on PCORI’s priority objectives and contributing to the achievement of its mission.
• Report opportunities to leadership to improve internal performance and collaboration where identified and support an inclusive, equitable culture in all of PCORI’s activities.
• Promote transparency for and meaningful outreach to stakeholders about the funded activities and other contributions of PCORI to the health research and healthcare ecosystem.

Work Environment and Benefits

• You’ll enjoy a purpose-driven hybrid work environment with 3 days on-site weekly (at minimum) in our Washington, DC, office. Occasional travel may be required.
• We offer an excellent compensation package, including generous PTO (up to 20-30 days of PTO based on job classification and/or years of service), medical, dental, and vision insurance, long-term and short-term disability, 401(a) plan with employer contribution up to 10%, life insurance, professional development reimbursement, employee engagement events, and more.
• As a research funder, convener, and employer, PCORI is dedicated to achieving inclusion and equitable access to health research and health outcomes through our work. Internally, we know inclusion, equity, and appreciation of diversity are about the experience and culture an organization builds for itself. Our efforts to create such a culture stretch across our entire organization, from recruiting our workforce to cultivating business relationships.

Responsibilities

Organizational Learning and Evaluation (OLE)

Learning Strategy & Capacity Development

• Oversee PCORI’s organizational learning strategy and evaluation activities to define and prioritize assessment and learning needs about PCORI’s progress and success across activities by providing strategic, operational, and coordination capacity and expert counsel for PCORI leadership and fostering a learning culture that prioritizes continuous evaluation, learning, and improvement in all PCORI activities.
• Contribute to organizational and programmatic strategic planning, decision-making, and communication with key audiences by analyzing progress on PCORI’s priority objectives and mission and report opportunities to leadership to improve internal performance, collaboration, and coordination where identified.
• Coordinate and promote alignment of activities with the Organizational Learning Strategy and its expectations for rigor and ethical conduct to ensure connectedness to required reporting as appropriate.
• Promote and oversee the development of strategies for reporting findings of organizational learning and evaluation activities to a range of external audiences, including the Board of Governors, external stakeholders, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), to promote transparency, accountability, and shared learning on how PCORI activities advance patient-centered outcomes research practices and progress on PCORI’s unique mission.
• Foster a culture of continuous monitoring, evaluation, and learning for data-driven decision-making, including through consultation and collaboration with other PCORI leaders to support capacity and competency across the organization, as appropriate.
• Provide expert counsel to PCORI leadership to consider and facilitate capacity building across the organization for the range of monitoring, evaluation, and learning activities, from design through use of findings in decision-making.

Evaluation Activities

• Design, oversee, and ensure continuous improvement approaches to answer key learning and evaluation questions, with a focus on organization-wide priorities and cross-cutting topics, such as assessing PCORI’s progress toward achievement of PCORI’s organizational goals and mission articulated in the strategic plan and studying unique and/or central aspects of PCORI’s approach (e.g., major initiatives, processes, or organizational policies) to understand their contributions.
• Ensure timely communication of the findings of organizational learning and evaluation activities and any recommendations about future organization-wide activities to PCORI leadership to inform strategic and operational decision-making.

Planning & Reporting

Strategic Planning, Execution & Reporting

• Oversee and lead, as appropriate, organizational processes and mechanisms for implementing enterprise-wide strategic objectives that align with PCORI’s Strategic Plan and ongoing strategic planning activities, including close collaborations with the Patient-Centered Research Programs department for maintaining and refreshing PCORI’s research funding directions.
• Ensure strong communication systems for organizational goals and priorities to other units and teams to facilitate program goal alignment with projects of strategic importance. This includes the review of organizational progress on Strategic Plan implementation with teams and PCORI leaders to promote accountability.
• Provide leadership and direction to support the collection and structure of robust and accurate funded portfolio information within and across programs to monitor progress on objectives outlined within the Strategic Plan, support rigorous analyses about PCORI’s funded projects and their contributions to the health research enterprise, and support data-driven decision-making.
• Provide leadership and coordination for organizational goal and priority setting based on inputs from the Deputy Executive Director for Strategy, other PCORI leadership, the Board of Governors, PCORI’s authorizing law, Strategic Plan, and active horizon scanning.
• Ensure coordination across the organization to enable strategy integration across operational and programmatic work and report to PCORI Leadership, the Board of Governors, or other stakeholders on progress toward strategic objectives and PCORI contributions to the health and health research enterprise as needed.
• Oversee strategic coordination for PCORI partnerships as relevant to building collaboration with federal agencies, other non-profit organizations, etc.

Portfolio-focused Outreach and Organizational Policy

• Lead, coordinate, and contribute to response development for inquiries from key audiences (internal and external) about organizational performance and achievement of the mission. Identify and develop illustrative examples of studies or PCORI activities that reflect progress on Strategic Plan objectives and PCORI priorities for various stakeholders in collaboration with appropriate groups or Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) across PCORI.
• Develop communications material to ensure regular updates to internal and external PCORI stakeholders about the success and impact of PCORI activities on the health research enterprise, as well as regular research communications to promote awareness of the findings from and advances fueled by PCORI’s funded-CER portfolio.
• Partner with leaders and executives across the Strategy, PCRP, and Operations Departments, where appropriate, to promote and develop sound organizational policies that guide PCORI’s stewardship of and leadership through organizational activities, research funding and program oversight practices, and the responsible conduct of PCORI-funded research and research-related activities.
• Collaborate with other PCORI leaders to apply learnings and analyses of PCORI programs and activities to develop best practices for facilitating and conducting patient-centered CER, as well as optimize internal processes and practices where appropriate.

Management & Leadership

• Support and contribute to developing and maintaining PCORI’s personnel and other administrative policies and procedures.
• Strategically allocate resources to support monitoring, evaluation, and organizational learning activities to advance organizational business and mission priorities.
• Proactive and effective management of teams and individual employees, promoting a strong, collaborative, and positive culture and work environment, as well as providing appropriate growth and professional development opportunities for staff.
• Provide department-wide leadership within the Strategy, Planning & Outreach Leadership Team and serve as a member of PCORI’s Senior Leadership Team, providing expert counsel to PCORI’s Executive Leadership Team on issues pertaining to subject matter expertise.
• Promote a strong, collaborative, positive culture and work environment and provide appropriate growth and professional development opportunities for staff.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree required; PhD strongly preferred. 15 years of experience with strategic and analytic expertise in a defined area relevant to PCORI’s portfolio (e.g., biomedical or clinical research, public health, health services research, extramural research funding, community engagement, etc.).
• At least 5 years of leadership for program and program administration activities or relevant oversight experience within an academic, government, or non-profit environment.
• Demonstrated experience supporting the dissemination of organizational accomplishments and learnings for a variety of technical and lay audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to work across and support collaboration among multi-functional teams residing within multiple departments, including modeling highly collaborative and respective professional relationships.
• Demonstrated excellence as a communicator, oral and written, with internal and external parties at all levels of seniority and with a broad array of experience and expertise.
• Proven ability to manage people and teams, set goals and expectations, deliver feedback, and motivate and inspire staff.
• Demonstrated commitment to integrating values to support diverse, equitable, and inclusive approaches into all aspects of leading and building teams and collaborations.

About Us

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) is an independent non-profit organization authorized by Congress in 2010 and reauthorized in 2019. Its mission is to fund research that will provide patients, their caregivers, and clinicians with the evidence-based information needed to make better-informed healthcare decisions. PCORI seeks input from a broad range of stakeholders to guide its work.

To Apply

We encourage you to apply even if your experience is not a 100% match with the position description; we will consider people from a variety of backgrounds and career experiences.

Use the "Apply" button on this page or simply email your resume to Aileen Hedden at resumes@staffingadvisors.com with “PCORI - CPEO #2023-2800 ASAE” as the subject of the email.

Job responsibilities are similar to the following positions: Director of Strategic Planning and Evaluation, Planning and Evaluation Officer, SVP of Strategy & Operations, Research, Planning and Evaluation Officer.

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