On September 6, the IOM released a new report, “Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America,” that lays out a road map for addressing the issues of cost and quality in the U.S. health care system. The report describes the importance of transforming the U.S. health care system into a “continuously learning” system that promotes a culture of improvement. Expanding the volume of accessible clinical data for comparative effective research (CER), patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR), and quality improvement (QI) is an important step toward achieving this vision. The committee report authors note that reducing variation in clinical practice and promoting adherence to evidence-based best practices relies on access to a comprehensive, high quality body of representative data that practitioners can easily access and use to inform their clinical decisions. However, data collection and dissemination of this magnitude requires a robust technological infrastructure that providers and hospitals often cannot afford to build on their own, and while significant advancements in computing power and innovation highlighted in the IOM report allow this type of undertaking to be possible, financial support may present a major barrier. A new issue brief from AcademyHealth’s Electronic Data Methods (EDM) Forum shares the infrastructure goals of the $1.1 billion in grants for CER from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 (ARRA); and ways in which the funding sought to develop new strategies to collect, organize, and disseminate relevant clinical information. Nearly 40 percent of the ARRA CER funds were dedicated to build infrastructure and clinical data capacity. The ARRA funding sponsors 130 programs through supporting agencies such as the Office of the Secretary for Health and Human Services, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the National Institutes of Health. Collectively, these projects are tasked with promoting the use of CER in clinical practice...Read the rest of this post by Eric Schultz on the EDM Forum blog.

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