EHRs Needed For Comparative Effectiveness Research, Too

A year-old consortium of academic medical centers, pharmaceutical companies, and information technology firms is trying to find a way to harness electronic health records for clinical research. The Partnership to Advance Clinical Electronic Research (PACeR) is to be commended for its efforts, which could help researchers identify clinical trial subjects and improve protocol modeling and data collection.

As important as this undertaking is, however, there's another project that could have a far greater and more immediate impact on public health. In contrast to PACeR, this project is receiving no private funding, because it won't help any drug company make money. What I'm referring to is the use of EHRs in comparative effectiveness research (CER). What's most urgently needed now is to set up "pragmatic clinical trials" that compare the efficacy of different tests and treatments in typical practice situations, so that physicians will be likely to incorporate the results into their medical decisions.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 allocates $1.1 billion to CER--including $300 million to the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ), $400 million to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and $400 million to the Secretary of Health and Human Services.