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Comparative Effectiveness

Making high-quality affordable health care available for more people in the United States requires finding ways to get more health benefit for the dollars spent. Although evidence-based decision making has the potential to help achieve this goal, decision-makers too often encounter critical gaps in knowledge, leading to decisions based on unreliable evidence. These gaps suggest systematic flaws in the ability of the current research enterprise to generate the information decision-makers need.

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) aims to fill these gaps. Though CER is nothing new, perhaps for the first time, the health community, including device manufacturers, payers, research sponsors, and other public and private organizations are joining forces to put CER in the field.CMTP focuses on a range of methods for evaluating comparative effectiveness, including pragmatic trials, adaptive designs, clinical registries, and other study designs that generate evidence that will provide patients, clinicians and payers with a reasonable level of confidence in their decision making.  Visit our projects page for more examples of our work.

More information

  • CMTP will hold the first CER Institute July 25 - 27, 2011 in Santa Fe, New Mexico to expose participants to a broad range of methodological issues that arrise when conducting CER, introduce emerging policy trends, and ensure that participants understand effective methods for translating the results from CER studies into policy. 
  • In this presentation, Sean Tunis provides a comparative effectiveness overview and roadmap to addressing the evidence gaps that impede progress in evidence-based decision making.
  • Various definitions of CER by leading research, government and policy entities.
  • This issue brief provides details on the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the non-profit entity established in the 2010 health reform law that will develop and execute and national CER agenda.
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