Genes work in concert as a system as opposed to independent entities and mediate disease states. There has been considerable interest in understanding variations in molecular signatures between normal and disease states. However, a majority of techniques implicitly assume homogeneity between samples within a given group and use a fixed set of genes in discerning the groups. The proposed study o...

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) is an independent, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization authorized under the Affordable Care Act of 2010 and funded by Congress to help close the gaps in research needed to improve key health outcomes. To do this, PCORI identifies critical research questions, funds patient-centered comparative effectiveness research (CER), and strives ...

Patient- and provider-reported outcomes are recognized as important in evaluating quality of care, guiding health care policy, comparative effectiveness research, and decision-making in radiation oncology. Combining patient and provider outcome data with a detailed description of disease and therapy is the basis for these analyses. We report on the combination of technical solutions and clinica...

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among women. To date, the use of efficacy randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in breast cancer have resulted in dramatic improvements in oncologic outcomes for this disease. However, not every question pertinent to breast cancer is amenable to such efficacy trials. This chapter will discuss some of the unique aspects of breast cancer that make...

The consolidation of health care systems to develop centers of clinical excellence has led to an increased reliance on medical transport to move patients requiring time-sensitive interventions and specialized treatments. There is a paucity of outcomes data, specifically comparative effectiveness research, related to the efficacy of different transport services and the overall morbidity and mort...

BACKGROUND The field of clinical research informatics includes creation of clinical data repositories (CDRs) used to conduct quality improvement (QI) activities and comparative effectiveness research (CER). Ideally, CDR data are accurately and directly abstracted from disparate electronic health records (EHRs), across diverse health-systems. OBJECTIVE Investigators from Washington State's Sur...

Several advances in large data set collection and processing have the potential to provide a wave of new insights and improvements in the use of radiation therapy for cancer treatment. The era of electronic health records, genomics, and improving information technology resources creates the opportunity to leverage these developments to create a learning healthcare system that can rapidly delive...

Editors from a number of medical journals lay out principles for journals considering publication of Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER). In order to encourage dissemination of this editorial, this article is freely available in PLoS Medicine and will be also published in Medical Decision Making, Croatian Medical Journal, The Cochrane Library, Trials, The American Journal of Managed Care, ...

OBJECTIVE To raise awareness among clinicians and epidemiologists that single-patient (n-of-1) trials are potentially useful for informing personalized treatment decisions for patients with chronic conditions. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING We reviewed the clinical and statistical literature on methods and applications of single-patient trials and then critically evaluated the needs for further met...

The use of indirect comparisons to evaluate the relative effectiveness between two or more treatments is widespread in the literature and continues to grow each year. Appropriate methodologies will be essential for integrating data from various published clinical trials into a systematic framework as part of the increasing emphasis on comparative effectiveness research. This article provides a ...