Pediatric Research Consortium

The Pediatric Research Consortium (PeRC), the primary care practice-based research network at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, launched in 2002 with funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. PeRC has assembled a talented group of epidemiologists and health services researchers, clinical informaticians, and administrators to organize and facilitate the clinical research projects that it agrees to undertake to improve the safety, quality, and health outcomes of pediatric care. PeRC’s consistent successes in supporting the completion of complex studies have resulted in an increasing demand for collaboration and access to the primary care network and data in the electronic health record system (EHR).

PeRC has been able to take advantage of CHOP's expanded organizational and technological infrastructure in assembling the components of one of the country's largest pediatric integrated delivery system, which includes a primary pediatric healthcare network located in urban, suburban, and rural locations throughout the Delaware Valley and extending to the Jersey shore. PERC caters to the diverse needs of the three main parties who benefit from practice-based research: researchers, care centers and practices, and patients and families.

In addition, PeRC has taken advantage of the implementation of an ambulatory EHR — a technological tool that affords immediate, electronic access to clinical information and communication at the point of care — to gather data across the pediatric network to conduct research and develop an array of integrated evidence-based decision support tools at the point of care. The EHR is currently in use in more than 31 primary care practices throughout the network. Since its inception in 2001, the EHR has captured data for more than 684,267 patients.