Earlier this month, ECRI’s 17th annual conference tackled the thorniest detail of comparative effectiveness research, namely that it’s rarely a simple matter of A > B. Groups and individuals respond differently.
With a theme of “Comparative Effectiveness and Personalized Medicine,” the nonprofit and its partners at NIH and Health Affairs, among others, sought to better understand how big research ideas will interface with the person-by-person decisions through which such work will ultimately be implemented.
The conference has a detailed postmortem online, including two days of video (Fair warning: Together, they’re a good 700+ minutes of conference) and slides from a number of the presentations. I strongly recommend using the conference schedule listed on the slides page as a rough guide to finding the most relevant bits of video.
In case you’re looking for a place to start, here are two of the most relevant presentations:
- Keeping the comparative effectiveness debate rational
- Comparative effectiveness research in the Veterans Health Administration (and in Kaiser Permanente, which references patient preference and participation)
The online Q and A is also interesting, though there are only a handful of answers up at present. The most relevant one so far comes from Vivian Coates (Vice President, Information Services and Health Technology Assessment, ECRI Institute), in response to a query about a central listing of comparative effectiveness projects.
The CER inventory contract was awarded to the Lewin Group Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) in June, 2010. Over the 27 month period of the contract, Lewin will design, build and launch a web-based inventory that catalogs CER outputs and activity, including research studies, relevant research methods, training of researchers, data infrastructure and approaches for dissemination and translation of comparative effectiveness research to health care providers and patients.
