Word: researchers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...another man's profits; lobbyists for drug- and devicemakers, hospitals, doctors and insurers are already fighting to make sure their slices of the more than $2 trillion health-care pie aren't nibbled by reform. Senate Republicans just introduced "antirationing" legislation to bar the government from using comparative-effectiveness research - "a common tool used by socialized health-care systems" - for cost control. They paused in their usual attacks on Obama's profligacy just long enough to attack his stinginess, warning that he will use evidence as an excuse to micromanage the art of medicine, stifle innovation and deny Americans their...
...want to see evidence." It turns out that Emanuel's boss, budget director Peter Orszag, is also a data-driven guy, as is Orszag's boss, the President of the United States. They've already stuffed $1.1 billion into the stimulus bill to jump-start "comparative effectiveness research" into which treatments work best in which situations. Now they're pushing to overhaul the entire health-care sector by year's end, and they're determined to replace ignorance with evidence, to create a data-driven system, to shift one-sixth of the economy from "that's what we do here...
...much as 30% of it - perhaps $700 billion a year - may be wasted on unneeded care, mostly routine CT scans and MRIs, office visits, hospital stays, minor procedures and brand-name prescriptions that are requested by patients and ordered by doctors every day. Orszag is particularly obsessed with research by the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, documenting huge regional variations in costs but virtually no variations in outcomes. For example, chronically ill patients in Los Angeles visited doctors an average of 59.2 times in the last six months of their life, vs. only 14.5 times in Ogden...
...stents can work miracles when inserted quickly after heart attacks but don't seem to help much as preventive measures; that the areas with the most hospital beds, imaging machines and specialists spend the most on excess hospital stays, MRIs and specialty care. But the big money in medical research goes to testing new drugs and cutting-edge technologies, not to comparing existing treatments. Drug companies often just have to prove that their products are better than placebos to get FDA approval; new devices merely have to be similar to existing products. Nobody has to show that their drug...
...Mayo also has an institutional obsession with evidence-based medicine, using electronic records for in-house effectiveness research, constantly monitoring its doctors on everything from infection rates to operating times to patient outcomes, minimizing the art of medicine and maximizing the science. "We try to drive out variation wherever we can," says Charles (Mike) Harper, a neurologist who oversees Mayo's clinical practice in Rochester. "Practicing medicine is not the same as building Toyotas, but you can still standardize. Uncertainty shouldn't be an excuse to ignore data." Mayo has teams working on evidence-based protocols to reduce...