Summary
This past Tuesday morning, on schedule, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences released a highly anticipated report listing the nation's top 100 priorities for spending $1.1 billion to compare the relative effectiveness of competing drugs, medical devices, other treatments and operations for specific health conditions. This is all part of broad effort by the Obama Administration to shift the focus of medical practice toward more consistent adherence with the best scientific evidence on what works and what doesn't.
Analysis
Some of the medical areas recommended for comparative effectiveness research include, among many others: the treatment of prostate cancer and arrhythmias, whose treatments have been controversial in the past. Other conditions and their treatments were selected based on the number of people affected, the severity of medical consequences should one treatment not be as effective as another, and those with a number of intervention alternatives with no clear winner. In addition, many comparisons of medical devices, operations and other interventions for a range of conditions have been prioritized for comparative evaluations of their relative effectiveness of many prevalent and potentially serious medical conditions.
While most of the panel's recommendations involved comparing medical treatments, other included topics like the best way to reduce hospital based infections or to compare the effectiveness of various medical imaging technologies, an area targeted for dramatic cost reductions by the Administration. Some of the panel's recommendations also involved comparing social or preventative programs such as the relative effectiveness of reducing childhood obesity (a major public health emphasis) through the banning of vending machines in schools.
Companies in a position to prosper from this major investment of $1.1 billion in the next few years to compare the relative effectiveness of these various preventative, diagnostic, and therapeutic interventions include those with access to large clinical databases and sophisticated analytic methodologies to evaluate them such as:
1. Premier, Inc.
2. CSC;
3. Perot Systems;
4. Hewlett Packard;
5. IBM;
6. Accenture;
7. Pricewaterhouse Coopers;
8. Medco;
9. Express Scripts; and
10. CVS Caremark.
