Baker Institute conference July 13 will highlight importance of comparative effectiveness research in health care

Jeff Falk
713-348-6775
jfalk@rice.edu

Baker Institute conference July 13 will highlight importance of comparative effectiveness research in health care
Leading experts to meet at Rice in aftermath of Supreme Court’s ruling on Affordable Care Act

HOUSTON – (July 10, 2012) – In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s landmark Affordable Care Act ruling, leading health care researchers will discuss strategies for analyzing large population databases to conduct comparative effectiveness research (CER) July 13 at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. CER uses data on large populations of patients from clinical trials and real-world treatment settings to compare health care practices and determine which ones are the most effective.   

Who: Leading national and Texas health care experts.

What: Conference on “Comparative Effectiveness Research with Population-Based Data.”

When: Friday, July 13, 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

Where: Rice University, Baker Hall’s Doré Commons, 6100 Main St.

This conference is a collaborative endeavor among CER groups in Texas. Pilot studies and preliminary results will be presented from two multi-investigator projects. The first project will focus on cancer care in Texas and the second on disability and function. 

“If you are sick and seek medical help, you obviously have the right to expect that your doctor will choose the most effective treatments from different alternatives, and that the choices will be based on solid evidence,” said Vivian Ho, the James A. Baker III Institute Chair in Health Economics and one of the conference’s organizers. “But that is not obvious to some American health care providers, who make far too many decisions based on force of habit or purely economic motivations. Fortunately, in the Affordable Care Act, Congress took little-noticed, important steps to rectify this problem by funding comparative effectiveness research. In the long run, government-sponsored CER might have as much impact on Americans as the more publicized components of the law, such as the mandate to buy health insurance.”

Featured speakers will include:

M. Alan Brookhart
Associate professor of epidemiology, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Mary Beth Landrum
Associate professor, Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School.

Matthew L. Maciejewski
Professor in medicine, Duke University School of Medicine; director, Health Economics and Policy Unit, Center for Health Services Research in Primary Care, Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

This event is co-sponsored by UTMB Health, Comparative Effectiveness Research on Cancer in Texas, the Institute for Translational Sciences, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Center for Rehabilitation Research Using Large Datasets and the Baker Institute Health Policy Forum.

The event is closed to the public. Members of the news media who want to attend should RSVP to Jeff Falk at jfalk@rice.edu or 713-348-6775.

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Related materials:

Conference information: http://bakerinstitute.org/events/comparative-effectiveness-research-with-population-based-data

Founded in 1993, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston ranks among the top 20 university-affiliated think tanks globally and top 30 think tanks in the United States. As a premier nonpartisan think tank, the institute sponsors more than 20 programs that conduct research on domestic and foreign policy issues with the goal of bridging the gap between the theory and practice of public policy. The institute’s strong track record of achievement reflects the work of its endowed fellows and Rice University scholars. Learn more about the institute at www.bakerinstitute.org or on the institute’s blog, http://blogs.chron.com/bakerblog.