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The New Era of Comparative Effectiveness: Will Public Health End up Left Behind?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Richard S. Saver
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As a result of health care reform, medicine has entered a new era of comparative effectiveness. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) created the nation’s first comprehensive comparative effectiveness research (CER) program, investing in CER at record levels and establishing a new regulatory framework for oversight of the research. CER attracts considerable enthusiasm as a tool for reform because it compares competing interventions to determine which works best, supplying critical information for medical decision-making and health policy. In theory, better evidence of how treatments fare relative to one another will translate to better medical care. According to some optimistic accounts, CER can lead to a “revolution” in clinical practice, has transformative power “to reshape major portions of the practice of medicine,” and represents a major “turning point” for the health care system.

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , Fall 2011 , pp. 437 - 449
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2011

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