Comparative effectiveness research (CER) is the concept of evaluating evidence on the relative medical benefits and costs of various treatments to identify the most effective one for any given diagnosis. CER has the potential to help various segments of the health community make better-informed decisions. However, not all CER will generate information that is useful under all circumstances. The NHC is leading an effort to advance the development of usability criteria for CER with the aim of aiding patients and providers.
The impetus for the initiative began in 2012 when the NHC published an article discussing the need for CER usability criteria in an edition of Health Affairs that received funding from the National Pharmaceutical Council (NPC).
In 2013, the NHC worked with various opinion leaders on the establishment of a usability framework that will help researchers focus better on the questions they seek to answer, help those who fund CER with their reviews of research applications, help decision makers assess research findings and place them in context of the larger body of evidence, and help provide clarity on when and how research findings should be disseminated to various audiences, including patients.
The symposium was funded in part by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), which has deemed usability as a core requirement of patient-centeredness and researchers seeking support from PCORI must develop specific strategies to address the usability of data.