BACKGROUND As the USA seeks to expand the conduct and dissemination of comparative effectiveness research (CER), views of key stakeholders will help guide the way. METHODS We surveyed 60 medical and pharmacy directors from 46 state Medicaid programs. RESULTS Over 90% felt that CER would lead to better clinical decision-making and overall value within 5 years and were willing to consider cos...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), as amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, initiated comprehensive health reform for the healthcare sector of the United States. PPACA includes strategies to make the American healthcare sector more efficient and effective. PPACA's comparative effectiveness research initiative and the establishment of the Patie...

BACKGROUND Comparative effectiveness research (CER) often includes observational studies utilizing administrative data. Multiple conditioning methods can be used for CER to adjust for group differences, including difference-in-differences (DiD) estimation. OBJECTIVE This study presents DiD and demonstrates how to apply this conditioning method to estimate treatment outcomes in the CER setting...

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) is defined by the Institute of Medicine as "the generation and synthesis of evidence that compares the benefits and harms of alternative methods to prevent, diagnose, treat, and monitor a clinical condition or to improve the delivery of care." The goal of CER is to provide timely, useful evidence to healthcare decision makers including physicians, patien...

BACKGROUND A distributed research network (DRN) of electronic health care databases, in which data reside behind the firewall of each data partner, can support a wide range of comparative effectiveness research (CER) activities. An essential component of a fully functional DRN is the capability to perform robust statistical analyses to produce valid, actionable evidence without compromising pat...

Analysis of business-academia (B-A) collaborations typically relies on a single method, addressing one or two major research questions. In contrast, this article tackles both research and development (R&D) and innovation collaborations among businesses and academia relying on information using multiple methods and multiple sources of information to offer insights on dynamics and qualitative fea...

BACKGROUND Patient registry data serves an increasing role in drug safety and comparative effectiveness research, but registry databases often do not contain confounder information measured at the same time that treatments begin. This study evaluated a set of approaches for estimating confounder values at treatment initiation using actual data from a rheumatoid arthritis (RA) registry to examin...

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) technology has been proposed to benefit not only the management of increasingly large image collections, but also to aid clinical care, biomedical research, and education. Based on a literature review, we conclude that there is widespread enthusiasm for CBIR in the engineering research community, but the application of this technology to solve practical medi...

OBJECTIVES Our objective was to gather perspectives from payers on how comparative effectiveness research (CER) in the United States and relative effectiveness (RE) research in Europe will impact evidentiary standards for access decisions of new drugs by 2020. METHODS We conducted semi-structured interviews with fourteen senior officials representing public and private payers, health technolo...

BACKGROUND There is a need for more Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) on Chinese medicine (CM) to inform clinical and policy decision-making. This document aims to provide consensus advice for the design of CER trials on CM for researchers. It broadly aims to ensure more adequate design and optimal use of resources in generating evidence for CM to inform stakeholder decision-making. ME...