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November 26, 2007
Apples & Oranges
by Peter Pitts
The nation’s largest healthcare payers are embracing the use of what is known as “comparative effectiveness,” a fancy term for essentially evaluating different therapies for a particular condition based on their costs and efficacy. The trend is a politically popular way to help reign in the cost for drugs, devices, and procedures. And the move reflects a broader focus on cost, rather than care that is taking place at all levels of the American healthcare system.
But it’s important to move beyond criticizing comparative effectiveness in its current form, and instead towards creating a policy roadmap for integrating technologies and science that is more patient-centric into comparative effectiveness thinking.
Much the like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration created the Critical Path Initiative to apply 21st-century science to accelerate the development of personalized medicine, another national goal should be to create a Critical Path Initiative to apply new approaches to data analysis and clinical insights to promote patient-centric healthcare.
Why? Because comparative effectiveness should reflect and measure individual response to treatment based on the combination of genetic, clinical, and demographic factors that indicate what keep people healthy, improve their health, or prevent disease. First steps have been taken. For example, the Department of Health and Human Services has invested in electronic patient records and genomics. Encouraging the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to adopt the use of data that takes into account patient needs would complement such efforts.
Here's the rest of the story as explained in a new article in The Journal of Life Sciences:
http://www.tjols.com/article-421.html
Posted by peterpitts at November 26, 2007 08:48 AM
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