Patient-centered care that reflects consumer-driven health care decision of an individual as opposed to collective or social choice-based health decision has many implications for clinical decision and resource allocation. With possession of required information and faced with appropriate assessment of preferences, older adults make better choices for their own health. However, one must acknowl...

Outcomes research was defined in 1998 as “the study of the end results of health services that takes patients’ experiences, preferences, and values into account ... intended to provide scientific evidence relating to decisions made by all who participate in health care.”1 Inherent to this definition is the fact that outcomes research is multidisciplinary and relies on diverse domains of experti...

Outcomes analysis is emerging as a crucial tool in understanding and improving health care. To this end, outcomes research is focused on methodologies for assessing the impact and quality of clinical services and the penetration of new findings. Clinical trials are an important mechanism for generating data to support outcomes research activities. In clinical trials in surgical oncology, there ...

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) has received substantial attention as a potential approach for improving health outcomes while lowering costs of care, and for improving the relevance and quality of clinical and health services research. The Institute of Medicine defines CER as 'the conduct and synthesis of systematic research comparing different interventions and strategies to prevent,...

Anesthesia clinical research has changed tremendously over the past years. While 20 years ago most anesthesia research focused on immediate perioperative outcomes, mainly testing safety of anesthetics, there is increasing evidence that intraoperative anesthetic management has long-term consequences, affecting patients months and years after surgery. This is especially exciting considering that ...

The primary goal of medical education is to produce physicians who deliver high-quality health care. Recent calls for greater accountability in medical education and the development of outcomes research methodologies should encourage a new research effort to examine the effects of medical training upon clinical outcomes. The authors offer a research agenda that links medical education and quali...

I n the basic sciences, investigators frequently conduct descriptive studies as a prelude to formulating and testing hypotheses. These discovery studies can be quite unbounded at the outset as investigators accumulate novel information that will serve as the building blocks for future studies. In the clinical sciences, descriptive studies are also common, but they are almost always based on dat...