Comparing Providers and Provider Teams | Darren DeWalt, MD, MPH
Date/Time
Date(s) - 06/14/2013
9:00 am - 10:00 am
Location
Rosenfeld Conference Room - Sheps Center
Category(ies)
Comparative Effectiveness Research Methods Series: Applications to Health Services Research
Comparative effective research (CER) is now a standard method of comparing tests and treatments. AHRQ, NIH and now PCORI are all major funders of CER, as well as the related concept of Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR). UNC has developed substantial expertise in both CER research and training. Historically, CER has involved comparisons of two active clinical treatments, often medications or procedures. Often these were comparisons of two medications in head-to-head trials or use of analytic procedures to simulate head-to-head comparisons. As an example, comparison of one antidepressant with another can be helpful in the decision-making of patients and providers. Over the past 15 years, advances in methods have substantially assisted CER research. These advances include work in areas such as meta-analysis, pragmatic randomized clinical trials, and ways to address selection bias such as new user designs, propensity scores, and use of instrumental variables.
Health services research (HSR) often examines methods of delivering services to patients. Increasingly, HSR studies involve interventions to alter the health care system with the goals of enhancing quality and access to care, while controlling the costs of care delivery. Implementation of the Affordable Care Act will accelerate this process. Interventions including care management, practice organization, workforce composition, and modifications of the payment system will need to be tested. Organizing care delivery so as to improve quality while avoiding major cost increases will be the major challenge of ACA implementation. How can CER methods be adapted to address these critical questions?
The Cecil G. Sheps Center will host a series of short work sessions to discuss these issues. We will post the Pubmed links to 1-2 articles prior to each session to get the discussion started. Each session will be facilitated by an experienced faculty member. Scheduled sessions will occur monthly, on Fridays from 9:00–10:00 am in the Rosenfeld Conference Room (3 rd floor of the Sheps Center – room 306), 725 Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.