Comparative Effectiveness and the Patient-Doctor Relationship
It’s been a few months since President Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (H.R. 3590). The bill includes a provision to “address gaps in quality, efficiency, comparative effectiveness information, and health outcomes measures and data aggregation techniques.”
Last week, the Partnership to Improve Patient Care (PIPC), which includes a wide range of healthcare organizations working to support the government’s role in and awareness of CE research, held a forum about delivering patient-centered comparative effectiveness (CE) research. Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) was the forum’s keynote speaker.
“It’s only fitting that patients are at the center of the research we seek to foster in the new law,” the Senator told the audience. “No longer will patients and their doctors have too little information about how different treatments work.”
He went on to describe how today’s doctors and patients have more tests and treatment options to choose from then ever before, but do not necessarily have enough “reliable evidence” to help choose among those options. This is where the new law really comes into play. H.R. 3590 terminated the Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research that was established under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and instead established a Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute to commission CE and related drug research. The new center is to be funded for 10 years.
According to Baucus’ statement at the forum, patients will have strong representation on the governing board of the new Institute. Board members are currently being selected through the Government Accountability Office. “The research itself will focus on clinical outcomes in the real world,” said Baucus. “The research will focus on the information that doctors and patients find useful when making decisions about care. The new law requires the Institute to consider subgroups of patients that may experience different effects from the same treatments, if evidence in the field warrants it…. And the Institute will operate transparently and within a limited scope. …The Institute will not develop medical guidelines, treatment protocols or coverage recommendations of any sort.”
Overall, explained Baucus, the new Institute will help to strengthen the doctor-patient relationship by providing useful information so that patients can make better-informed decisions about their healthcare.
I look forward to seeing the work that comes out of the Institute and the how that information affects the patient-doctor relationship on a practical level. The fact that average citizens are able to nominate Institute Board members may help increase consumer confidence in the Institute’s work.
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