Comparative effectiveness research and the U.S. effective healthcare program

Abstract: In this talk I will describe the overall research agenda of the U.S. Effective Healthcare Program which funds individual researchers, research centers, and academic organizations to work together with Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to produce effectiveness and comparative effectiveness research for clinicians, consumers, and policymakers. I will then specifically focus on the comparative effectiveness research (CER) we are doing at Duke University as part of the Evidence-based Practice Center. This work aims to: (1) develop and refine topics for CERs that are informative to stakeholder decisional needs, (2) conduct CERs with systematic and transparent methods, and to (3) identify and explicate future research needs that are important to answering real-world healthcare decisions.