The overhaul creates an institute, funded with $500 million or more annually, to spur studies of which drugs, devices and medical procedures work best. The boost for comparative- effectiveness research, as the field is known among health experts, will increase scrutiny on treatments used by millions of Americans, including cholesterol drugs led by Pfizer Inc.’s Lipitor and heart stents from Medtronic Inc., said John Sullivan, an analyst at Leerink Swann & Co.
The findings may add scientific rigor to doctors’ decisions sometimes influenced more by marketing, said Jeffrey Lerner of the ECRI Institute, a nonprofit that conducts such research. In a health overhaul attacked by critics as too pricey, it’s one of the few measures with a chance to rein in U.S. medical spending that soared to $2.5 trillion last year, Sullivan said.
Still, “the savings can be substantial if you’re drawing a clinical study conclusion that a generic drug works as well as a branded drug,” said Leerink Swann’s Sullivan, offering one example of research that may be done. Therapies used by large numbers of people are likely to be investigators’ first targets.
2 comments:
$500M - this laughable. The Feds are going to either:
A) Have a rude awakening to the real costs of credible, controlled prospective clinical research.
or
B) Start cranking out questionable, unscientific and subjective retrospective meta-analyses that can be constructed to make just about any argument one sets out to prove.
The UK National Institute of Clinical Excellence, which is basically the British equivalent of this, has a budget of about $50 million per year (source). It doesn't run its own studies though, it only does meta-analysis.
Post a Comment