1. JAMA: The PCORI Perspective on Patient-Centered Outcomes Research, click here to view the article.
2. The New England Journal of Medicine: Updating Cost-Effectiveness — The Curious Resilience of the $50,000-Per-QALY Threshold, click here to view the article.
3. The Pink Sheet Daily: Costly Drugs Prompt Attention To QALY Value Measure In U.S., click here to view the piece (subscription required).
4. Knowledge@Warton: Health Care Outcomes: When the More Effective Choice Costs More, click here to view the post.
5. Naples Daily News: The Doctor Is In: Big Data Now a Big Part of Healthcare, click here to view the article.
Writing in JAMA last week, Lori Frank, PCORI’s Program Director of Research Integration and Evaluation; Ethan Basch, Director of Cancer Outcomes Research Program at UNC-Chapel Hill; and Joe V. Selby, Executive Director of PCORI, collaborated on an article. “PCORI funds research based on the belief that incorporating the patient perspective into health care research is inherently valuable and that including the end user of research in the research process enhances usefulness and speeds the uptake of research into practice. Patient-centered outcomes research is poised to substantially change how clinical questions are asked, how answers are pursued, and how those answers are used.” Click here to view the article.
2. The New England Journal of Medicine: Updating Cost-Effectiveness — The Curious Resilience of the $50,000-Per-QALY Threshold
Peter J. Neumann, Sc.D., Joshua T. Cohen, Ph.D., and Milton C. Weinstein, Ph.D. wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine, “[W]e face a powerful need to assess comparative value.[...] Despite its problems, the threshold is a useful tool for organizing evidence and informing decisions. [...] Finally, much more work is needed to elucidate the comparative effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of existing care and to establish systemwide incentives to encourage cost-conscious decisions.” Click here to view the article.
3. The Pink Sheet Daily: Costly Drugs Prompt Attention To QALY Value Measure In U.S.
The Pink Sheet Daily’s Cathy Kelly, also reported last week on QALY, “The Affordable Care Act specifically bars [PCORI] from using a cost-per-QALY threshold in its work on the comparative effectiveness of medical treatments. Nevertheless, Neumann and colleagues observe that the use of a QALY benchmark has increased in cost utility analyses over the past 12 years, based on an analysis of studies published from 1990 to 2012. The studies reviewed cover a wide variety of diseases and treatments.” Click here to view the piece (subscription required).
4. Knowledge@Warton: Health Care Outcomes: When the More Effective Choice Costs More
Recently the Wharton School of Management at the University of Pennsylvania commented on ACOs. “Beyond exhortation to pay attention and do better, it is likely that effective systems to increase physician attention to evidence will not be able to be imposed by regulation or direct government programs, but will need to be embedded in improved models of care delivery that rely on better reimbursement and organizational structures that provide stronger motivation to acquire and use information, such as the Accountable Care Organizations for Medicare that are part of health reform.” Click here to view the post.
5. Naples Daily News: The Doctor Is In: Big Data Now a Big Part of Healthcare
In a column published by the Naples Daily News, Allen Weiss wrote, “Patient-centered outcome research can be easily accelerated by using data collected from many different offices, shared with the cautions for privacy and confidentiality, but then studied to see who had the best outcomes and why this was so.[...] We have so much data which is not aggregated and would be so easy to morph into evidence-based medicine — another way for doing research to define best practices.” Click here to view the article.