An NIH study of treatments for high blood pressure, called the ALLHAT trial, shows some of the strengths and limitations of comparative effectiveness research to improve patient care. More...
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Below: PIPC Chairman Tony Coelho's recent speech on patient centered CER. The speech was delivered on Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at the Alliance for Specialty Medicine's “Capitol Hill Advocacy Conference,” in Washington, D.C.
A new Health Affairs article concludes, based on focus groups and interviews, that "consumers will revolt if evidence-based efforts are perceived as rationing or as a way to deny them needed treatment."
You don't need to look any further than public reaction to the U.S. Preventive Service Task Force's updated recommendations on mammography screening to see the proof of this.
How should policy-makers react? Should they conclude that consumers, and even more so, patients, cannot be relied on to make evidence-based decisions, and therefore these decisions need to be made for them? Or should they conclude that evidence-based models of medical care and health delivery need to be carefully constructed so they have the trust and support of patients and consumers?
On Saturday, May 22, The Washington Post published my letter to the editor on the opportunity we have in CER to answer the full range of questions that are important to improving patient care and health care quality. The letter responded to a commentary from physicians Jim Yong Kim and James N. Weinstein, who called for a research program to help us learn about what works best in health care delivery and patient management.
This is just one of the important strengths of the comparative effectiveness research (CER) provisions of the healthcare reform law.
With enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the patient and provider communities now for the first time have a blueprint for patient-centered comparative effectiveness research written into law.
In a recent press release, PIPC outlined the most important CER provisions in the bill.
“Congress worked hard to pass health care reform that included patient-centered CER. The bill will result in the creation of the Patient-Cent
A recent Wall Street Journal article about the use of stent procedures in the medical community and the reaction to it by blogger Burt Cohen, offers another illustration of the complexities of comparative research, and again shows why results should be used to inform doctors and patients, but not to impose broad “one size fits all” prescriptions that do not reflect the complexities of the science or the differences in individual patients.
A recent article by Jerome Groopman, M.D, provides some valuable, first-hand insight as to what can go wrong when policy makers “give teeth” to comparative effectiveness research (CER) studies by translating results into “best practices.” Groopman’s understanding of the limitations of CER and the complexities of delivery high quality care to each patient, lead him to caution against blunt application of CER in ways that do not give physicians the ability to deviat
A few days ago, I posted about what I saw as one of the key lessons from the controversy over the new U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s (USPSTF) mammography guidelines, namely, that expert panels can sometimes come to different conclusions based on the same evidence.
Agree or disagree with the recent changes to mammography guidelines by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), one thing is clear – two sets of highly qualified experts can come to very different conclusions when looking at the same evidence. This holds big implications for provisions of health care reform like comparative effectiveness research (CER).
Last week, PIPC Chairman Tony Coelho sat down with the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Association (SCAA) to talk about comparative effectiveness research (CER) and how this research and other aspects of health reform will affect patients.
The House of Representatives passed their health reform package - the Affordable Health Care for America Act - last Saturday night by a vote of 220 to 215. With all of the provisions packed into the 2,000-page bill, what's in this historic legislation for comparative effectiveness research (CER)?