Dec 21, 2010 - If you’re unfamiliar with the term “comparative effectiveness research” as it relates to your family’s health care, that unfamiliarity may soon change.

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) is the process of comparing health care procedures, treatments and screening exams in an effort to determine which offer patients the best outcomes. The ultimate goal of comparative effectiveness research is to determine medicine’s best practices.

Implementing CER findings has the potential to keep populations healthier, limit health disparities, and long-term, may significantly reduce costs within the health care system.

In 2009 the federal government allocated more than $1 billion dollars to implement a comparative effectiveness approach to the evaluation of medical treatment for those very reasons.

University of Minnesota Physicians chief executive officer Bobbi Daniels, M.D., recently joined health care experts from across the Twin Cities at the Minnesota Health Care Roundtable to discuss the potential impact of comparative effectiveness research. She also shed some light on how her organization’s 750+ physicians have already seen the benefits of capitalizing on medicine’s best practices.

Here are some highlights from Dr. Daniels.

Q: Dr. Daniels, do you view CER as one answer to improving health care in our country?

Daniels: I think CER is one tool in the toolbox. Alone, it can’t accomplish all of our goals, but when combined with other innovative solutions, I think it has the promise to make a big impact on our health care system.

One thing CER has to do to become successful is come up with the right outcomes. Often, legislators, physicians and patients become focused on the cost of certain procedures. But cost isn’t always the only measurement we should be considering. Sometimes, the most expensive treatment, surgery or intervention may be worth it. Sometimes, a costly treatment indeed may be better than the other treatments if they allow people to lead a more normal life.

Q: How does cost impact the care patients receive?

Daniels: A statistic that is often cited is that we’re spending 18 percent of the GDP on health care in this country. Spending 18 percent of the GDP might not be bad if our outcomes were the best in the world, but they’re not. Not only are we spending a lot, but we’re not getting what we need to improve the health of our population.

There’s a lot that we don’t know about what to do that is beneficial for patients. I think the opportunity absolutely exists to figure out what works and what doesn’t, and as we do, we can really improve health care across the country.

Q: Opponents of CER mention the government’s commitment to spend $1.1 billion on implementing a system we’re unsure will have long-term savings. Can you talk about that?

Daniels: $1.1 billion is a large number, but it’s an amount that – in the context of health care dollars spent in this country – is a relatively small amount of money to solve a huge number of issues. When you think about the potential to save money by eliminating tests and procedures that we can prove don’t make a positive impact in the care we deliver, you don’t have to find many things before that $ 1.1 billion can be paid back.

Q: How does University of Minnesota Physicians capitalize on medicine’s best practices?

Daniels: We have more than 750 physicians, so there is obviously an incredible diversity of views. One commonality however, is that I believe each of our physicians wants to provide the right care at the right time to arrive at the right outcome. The problem is that much of the data doesn’t yet exist.

The structure of University of Minnesota Physicians allows us to implement medicine’s best practices quickly across our organization, but that is a luxury many health systems or large physician groups simply don’t have.

I think there is a lot of promise with CER – along with a variety of other improvement methods – to improve the delivery of health care broadly in this country.