Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER)

This. Is. Important.

I'm not going to explain comparative effectiveness research here. If the reader does not already know what that means, then do some homework. CER is absolutely foundational to health care reform and cost controls.
All these acronyms are making me crazy, but they're unavoidable, like flies at a picnic.
Clearly, point #3 is more important than the others in order for political opposition to reform to be minimized.

...here are five guidelines for the evolution of CER:

1. CER is critically important to filling information gaps for clinicians and patients.

2. If we want to CER to truly help patients, they need to be at the table in CER design to identify priorities and ask research questions.

3. CER findings need to be broadly disseminated, including to consumers, which means that they need to be translated into a way that makes CER findings meaningful to consumers.

4. CER dissemination is not enough to ensure the consumer engagement in care that is so critical to better, more efficient health care.

5. We need to work just as hard (through both innovation design and scientific research) to develop creative strategies — like information therapy (Ix) — to ensure that CER findings are well integrated into the care delivery process in a way that supports shared decision making (SDM) and participatory medicine.