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A congressionally created council has released a report with recommendations for how the Department of Health and Human Services should spend $400 million in discretionary spending for comparative effectiveness research. Some of the funds will be used to adopt information technologies that can speed dissemination of best practices information.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act appropriated $1.1 billion to assess the strengths and weaknesses of various medical treatments. The law provided $300 million to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, $400 million to the National Institutes of Health and $400 million in discretionary funds.

The discretionary funds must be used for initiatives that accelerate development and dissemination of research. These initiatives must, among other requirements, "encourage the development and use of clinical registries, clinical data networks and other forms of electronic health data that can be used to generate or obtain outcomes data," according to the law.

The report, from the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, stresses the importance of making it easier for clinicians and patients to find information on best practices and new treatments.

"Patients and their caregivers search in vain on the Internet or elsewhere for evidence to help guide their decisions," according to the report. "They often fail to find this information either because it does not exist or because it has never been collected and synthesized to inform patients and/or their caregivers in patient-friendly language. When they do find information, it may be informed by marketing objectives, not the best evidence."

The report comes a month before a July 30 deadline for HHS to submit a specific plan for spending all the $1.1 billion in comparative research funds. The report of the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research is available at hhs.gov/recovery/programs/cer.

--Joseph Goedert