Thursday, April 15, 2010

Harvard's Jerry Avorn gears up for comparatve effectiveness boom

Harvard Medical School professor Jerry Avorn, a critic of drug industry marketing, hired five faculty members in the past nine months to study whether prescription medicines are as good as advertised. Avorn says a $3 billion injection of funds from President Barack Obama’s health overhaul bill is certain to accelerate research that compares the effectiveness of drugs and other medical therapies, producing guides for doctors that pharmaceutical companies rarely do.

For Harvard’s Avorn, government attention and funding provided a “shot in the arm” for his research. Comparative research will let doctors and health-care companies focus their efforts, he said.

“Finally the health-care system has begun to ask questions companies all over the world have been asking for generations,” Avorn said.

Posted via web from Jack's posterous

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