Resolving conflicting comparative effectiveness research in critical care*

Conflicting health information: a critical research need

Conflicting health information is increasing in amount and visibility, as evidenced most recently by the controversy surrounding the risks and benefits of childhood vaccinations. The mechanisms through which conflicting information affects individuals are poorly understood; thus, we are unprepared to help people process conflicting information when making important health decisions. In this vie...

Resolving Conflicting Arguments under Uncertainties

Distributed knowledge based applications in open domain rely on common sense infor­ mation which is bound to be uncertain and incomplete. To draw the useful conclusions from ambiguous data, one must address un­ certainties and conflicts incurred in a holis­ tic view. No integrated frameworks are vi­ able without an in-depth analysis of con­ flicts incurred by uncertainties. In this pa­ per, we ...

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 ...

Patient-centered comparative effectiveness research: essential for high-quality care.

Methods in comparative effectiveness research.

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) seeks to assist consumers, clinicians, purchasers, and policy makers to make informed decisions to improve health care at both the individual and population levels. CER includes evidence generation and evidence synthesis. Randomized controlled trials are central to CER because of the lack of selection bias, with the recent development of adaptive and pra...