What is a Pragmatic Clinical Trial?
Schwartz and Lellouch were the first to use the word “pragmatic” in relation to clinical trials in 1967. They defined a pragmatic trial as a trial designed to help chose between care options, as opposed to an explanatory trial which is used to test causal research hypotheses, for example about biological processes.
About 30 years later Roland and Torgerson made the distinction between these two types of trial in a slightly different way, explaining that explanatory trials evaluate efficacy, the effect of treatment in ideal conditions and pragmatic trials evaluate effectiveness, the effect of treatment in routine clinical practice.
In the twenty-first century it has been recognised that there is, in fact, a spectrum of trials with very explanatory trials at one end and very pragmatic trials at the other end.