Prioritizing Comparative Effectiveness Research

Afschin Gandjour ()

PharmacoEconomics, 2011, vol. 29, issue 7, 555-561

Abstract: Comparative effectiveness research (CER) is 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 purpose of this article is to compare–within the scope of CER–the value of implementation and drug trials. Implementation trials have limitations similar to drug trials in terms of generalizability of results outside the trial setting and ability to identify best practice. However, in contrast to drug trials, implementation trials do not provide value in terms of ruling out harm, as implementation strategies are unlikely to cause harm in the first place. Still, implementation trials may provide good value when there is a high error probability in deciding whether implementation will be cost effective or if costs associated with making an erroneous decision are high. Yet the low risk of implementation programmes to cause harm may also allow for alternative approaches to identify best implementation practice, perhaps outside the scope of rigorous trials and testing.One such approach that requires further investigation is a competitive market for quality of care, where implementation programmes may be introduced without prior evaluation. Copyright Springer International Publishing AG 2011

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.2165/11588330-000000000-00000 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:pharme:v:29:y:2011:i:7:p:555-561

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40273

DOI: 10.2165/11588330-000000000-00000

Access Statistics for this article

PharmacoEconomics is currently edited by Timothy Wrightson and Christopher I. Carswell

More articles in PharmacoEconomics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().