Pilot Core

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ABSTRACT The Pilot Core will support early to mid-stage research projects to identify, develop, adapt, and evaluate innovative behavioral interventions related to health and aging. Implementing partners often lack the expertise, funding, and/or academic team to conduct rigorous evaluations. This Core will address these common barriers by identifying new areas of study, providing pilot grants to promising projects, supporting those projects throughout their design and implementation, and ultimately creating a sustained research agenda to advance the fields of aging and economics to improve health care delivery and health outcomes for midlife and older people. It will complement and leverage the existing and ongoing related activities of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab North America (J-PAL North America), located at MIT. This Core will focus on several aims. First, this core will identify new opportunities to develop and test evidence-informed behavioral interventions related to health and aging. We will identify innovative, promising behavioral interventions geared towards improving the health of an aging population that are suitable candidates for low-cost randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Second, this core will provide pilot funding through a formalized review process for trials of behavioral interventions related to aging. This core will provide small pilot grants to catalyze early project activities and provide an early-stage project the resources to raise additional funding. Third, this core will support funded pilots from the review process through implementation. Researchers in the J-PAL network as well as others called on to provide their expertise will provide mentorship and feedback to pilot investigators as they test and iterate on their intervention and study designs. Finally, this core will create a sustained translational behavioral intervention development program to advance the evidence base in the fields of aging and behavioral economics. Through this Core’s continued involvement with the funded pilot projects from Stage I to Stage IV, we aim to spur significant advancements in understanding which behavioral mechanisms and interventions work to improve the health of older adults.