Introducing the topic of comparative effectiveness for prostate cancer treatments with a reminder of the disease's heterogeneity risks tautology. However, the profound variation both in this cancer's biology and its clinical course is increasingly widely recognized, while management alternatives for clinically localized prostate cancer have exploded. Available options now include active surveil...

OBJECTIVES To describe a new, rigorous, comprehensive practice-based evidence for clinical practice improvement (PBE-CPI) study methodology, and compare its features, advantages, and disadvantages to those of randomized controlled trials and sophisticated statistical methods for comparative effectiveness research. RESEARCH DESIGN PBE-CPI incorporates natural variation within data from routine...

The United States is undertaking a major expansion of comparative effectiveness research, with the potential to achieve systemwide improvements in health care quality, outcomes, and resource allocation. However, to achieve these improvements in children's health and health care, comparative effectiveness research needs to be targeted, designed, conducted, and reported in ways that are responsiv...

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) using observational data requires informatics methods for the extraction, standardization, sharing, and integration of data derived from a variety of electronic sources. In the Oncoshare project, we have developed such methods as part of a collaborative multi-institutional CER study of patterns, predictors, and outcome of breast cancer care. In this pape...

BACKGROUND There is a need for more Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) to strengthen the evidence base for clinical and policy decision-making. Effectiveness Guidance Documents (EGD) are targeted to clinical researchers. The aim of this EGD is to provide specific recommendations for the design of prospective acupuncture studies to support optimal use of resources for generating evidence t...

Better understanding of the role of learning by doing and learning by research at different stages of technical progress is important for development of a theory of innovation and designing effective technology policies. This paper presents a comparative analysis of energy technology learning and progress within the framework of Schumpeter’s invention-innovation-diffusion paradigm. We estimate ...

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) can make important contributions to the transformation of US health care by filling gaps left by tightly controlled clinical trials. However, without comprehensive and comparable data that reflect the diversity of the US health-care system, CER's value will be diminished. We document the limits of observational CER by examining the age at diagnosis, dise...

OBJECTIVES We analyzed the extent to which comparative effectiveness research (CER) organizations share terms for designs, analyzed coverage of CER designs in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and Emtree, and explored whether scientists use CER design terms. METHODS We developed local terminologies (LTs) and a CER design terminology by extracting terms in documents from five organizations. We d...

NC Med J May/June 2010, Volume 71, Number 3 developed, which involved strengthening the compressed bone through injection of cement. Case series studies that were restricted to a before-after comparison of patient outcomes demonstrated that they felt much better after the injection. Over 1,000 patients per year received this treatment in North Carolina. It was not until the summer of 2009 that ...

Medical devices play a vital role in diagnosing, treating, and preventing diseases and are an integral part of the health-care system. Many devices, including implantable medical devices, enter the market through a regulatory pathway that was not designed to assure safety and effectiveness. Several recent studies and high-profile device recalls have demonstrated the need for well-designed, vali...