Comparative effectiveness research: what happened to incorporating costs of care?

Comparative Effectiveness Research in Pediatric Respiratory Disease: Promise and Pitfalls

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) has become increasing central to clinical research in medicine. CER seeks to conduct clinical trials that compare different commonly used interventions in real-world settings (pragmatic clinical trials) and use a multitude of sources of evidence (including registries and cohort studies) to inform clinical decision making. CER also ensures that stakeholders (patients, families, care providers, insurers) have a voice in the research process by integrating formal stakeholder engagement as part of the research. This innovative approach to clinical research has distinct benefits and pitfalls. This review first defines what CER is and then describes some of its benefits and then pitfalls. The focus is on the role of CER in pediatrics.

Comparing effectiveness and outcomes in asthma and cystic fibrosis

As technology yields new treatments, pediatric pulmonologists need determine how best to use them and how to decide which ones are best for any specific group or individual patient. Physicians have always customized therapies based upon patient response, but the new concept of "Personalized (or precision) medicine" focuses attention to a greater degree on the individual needs of patients based on their genetic, biomarker, phenotypic, or psychosocial characteristics. The newly developed biologics for treatment of asthma and CFTR modulators for treatment of cystic fibrosis (CF) highlight this newer approach. As we have more treatments available, new approaches to testing efficacy and effectiveness of these new therapies is necessary in order to efficiently bring them to market and compare their benefits in real world practice. While comparative effectiveness can be tested in pragmatic clinic trials, the most common approaches make use of observational data such as administrative databases and patient registries but their use for this is fraught with pitfalls that may or may not be methodologically surmountable. Once new therapies have been shown to be efficacious and effective, it is important to be cognizant of methods for ensuring that all patients actually receive the treatments that will be best for them. Comparisons of the effectiveness of clinical practice in the form of benchmarking is helpful for this, and consideration of costs and cost-effectiveness is essential to judging the best treatment for patients in a real-world setting.

Tackling the increasing complexity of CF care

Health outcomes for individuals with cystic fibrosis (CF) have dramatically improved in parallel with better organization of clinical care systems, evolution of novel therapeutics, and improvements in diagnosis and screening for CF and CF-related complications. In parallel with these advances has come an increasing complexity and burden of care, leading to challenges with adherence to treatment regimens. As novel therapeutics continue to be developed and introduced to the CF care regimen, there are clear opportunities to refine and personalize care. This can be done by adding comparative effectiveness research to the CF clinical research paradigm and integrating novel technologies in drug delivery and remote monitoring that can facilitate adherence but also reduce the burden of treatment while maintaining efficacy. This review highlights both the challenges of the increasingly complex treatment regimens in CF and the opportunities to advance care by addressing adherence, implementation science, comparative effectiveness, and integration of novel technologies in CF care.

Assessment of psychological status in 100 elderly patients with functional dyspepsia

AIM: To assess the psychological status in elderly patients with functional dyspepsia, and to analyze their nursing interventions.

METHODS: One hundred elderly patients with functional dyspepsia treated at the Fifth Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University from January 2011 to December 2013 were included in a study group, and 100 healthy volunteers comprised a control group. The self-rating anxiety scale (SAS) and self-rating depression scale (SDS) were administered to assess the psychological status.

RESULTS: The SAS and SDS scores were significantly higher in the study group than in the control group (53.1 points ± 5.4 points vs 32.7 points ± 3.4 points, 57.8 points ± 4.3 points vs 33.5 points ± 3.2 points, P < 0.05). The somatization, depression and anxiety scores were also significantly higher in the study group (P < 0.05). After intervention, the SAS and SDS scores decreased significantly in the study group (P < 0.05).

CONCLUSION: Elderly patients with functional dyspepsia show varying degrees of anxiety, depression and other negative emotions, and targeted nursing interventions can help improve the patient's negative emotions.

Comparative effectiveness research in hand surgery

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) is a concept initiated by the Institute of Medicine and financially supported by the federal government. The primary objective of CER is to improve decision making in medicine. This research is intended to evaluate the effectiveness, benefits, and harmful effects of alternative interventions. CER studies are commonly large, simple, observational, and conducted using electronic databases. To date, there is little comparative effectiveness evidence within hand surgery to guide therapeutic decisions. To draw conclusions on effectiveness through electronic health records, databases must contain clinical information and outcomes relevant to hand surgery interventions, such as patient-related outcomes.

An official American Thoracic Society research statement: comparative effectiveness research in pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine

BACKGROUND

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) is intended to inform decision making in clinical practice, and is central to patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR).

PURPOSE

To summarize key aspects of CER definitions and provide examples highlighting the complementary nature of efficacy and CER studies in pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine.

METHODS

An ad hoc working group of the American Thoracic Society with experience in clinical trials, health services research, quality improvement, and behavioral sciences in pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine was convened. The group used an iterative consensus process, including a review by American Thoracic Society committees and assemblies.

RESULTS

The traditional efficacy paradigm relies on clinical trials with high internal validity to evaluate interventions in narrowly defined populations and in research settings. Efficacy studies address the question, "Can it work in optimal conditions?" The CER paradigm employs a wide range of study designs to understand the effects of interventions in clinical settings. CER studies address the question, "Does it work in practice?" The results of efficacy and CER studies may or may not agree. CER incorporates many attributes of outcomes research and health services research, while placing greater emphasis on meeting the expressed needs of nonresearcher stakeholders (e.g., patients, clinicians, and others).

CONCLUSIONS

CER complements traditional efficacy research by placing greater emphasis on the effects of interventions in practice, and developing evidence to address the needs of the many stakeholders involved in health care decisions. Stakeholder engagement is an important component of CER.

Comparative effectiveness research - what is it and how does one do it?

Recent initiatives have increased focus on medical research that explores robust comparisons of clinical approaches broadly defined as comparative effectiveness research (CER). Federal mandates have generated definitions, established priorities, and offered organizational approaches for coordinating and conducting CER. This review will summarize the various definitions of CER, the role of cost assessment, and key study components of CER including study populations, study design, the use of secondary data, comparators employed in studies, outcome measures, and how results of CER should be disseminated.

The case for a comparative, value-based alternative to the patient-centered outcomes research model for comparative effectiveness research

Considerable financial and human resources have been directed toward the emerging field of comparative effectiveness research (CER) in the US. Fundamentally, the concept of CER is so logical as to be almost self-evident; namely, that research regarding therapeutic strategies should go beyond efficacy and examine objectively their real-world effects and outcomes. In practice, however, reluctance to consider difficult questions related to the many dimensions of value in health care delivery and corresponding legislative constraints placed on the US CER enterprise risk limiting the ultimate utility of this investigative model. Significant constraints have been codified into the patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) model of CER, which is emerging as the de facto method for conducting CER in the US. The experience of the authors as clinicians attempting to use CER to improve complex management decisions, for which multidimensional considerations of value represent a critical component of the overall effectiveness of alternate strategies, highlight the inability of PCOR to comprehensively inform this process. This suggests that PCOR may be a suboptimal approach for performing clinically relevant CER. In this editorial, the authors use clinical examples to highlight the limitations of the PCOR approach to CER and to propose an alternate approach, which they term "comparative, value-based effectiveness research" (CVER). The authors believe that the narrow scope and fundamental limitations of PCOR mitigate its overall value to medical decision-makers attempting to optimize overall effectiveness in the real-world setting, while a more comprehensive approach like CVER has greater potential to realize practical benefits for patients, clinicians, and society as a whole.