Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)
The DEcIDE (Developing Evidence to Inform Decisions about Effectiveness) Network announces a new publication series Data Points that will be available on AHRQ’s Effective Health Care Program website. The new series will assist stakeholders in describing important trends and identifying research questions for new studies on comparative effectiveness and patient-centered outcomes. Researchers from the DEcIDE Network will initially use existing health care data bases, particularly those available from the Federal Medicare program, to produce the reports.

This series will offer new information and insights on the use of health care services and interventions for the treatment, management, and diagnosis of diseases, as well as the variations and potential disparities across patient subpopulations. Reports will provide brief descriptive statistics, background information, and analytic tables on a variety of specific, focused topics related to medical diagnoses, treatments, services, and patient populations. Specific reports will present new statistics on topics such as disease incidence, prevalence, and burden of illness, as well as outcomes such as readmission, morbidity, and mortality. The publication series will generally summarize the basic demographic and geographic breakdowns with additional details available in statistical tables that can be downloaded from the Effective Health Care Program website.

The first Data Points reports describe the incidence and prevalence of diabetic foot ulcers and some of its major complications in Medicare beneficiaries. Two reports now appear online.

New England Journal of Medicine (2011;364(15):1390-3)
A New England Journal of Medicine report indicates that if practice changes, CER could save $1 billion according to Adam G. Elshaug, MPH, PhD, and Alan M. Garber, MD, PhD, from the International Program in Health Policy and Practice at the Commonwealth Fund in New York City, and the Center for Health Policy and Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research at Stanford University in Stanford, CA. 
 
Additional CE Information
The Third National Comparative Effectiveness Summit will be held on October 13 and 14, 2011 in Washington, DC.  More information can be found at comparativeeffectivenesssummit.com.

Posted May 2011