From the pages of the Wall Street Journal:
Cleveland Clinic CEO Worries Comparative Effectiveness Could Stifle Innovation
By Katherine Hobson
The last time we looked at consumer effectiveness research — basically defined as identifying which health care services work best under which circumstances — it was
Now it’s the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic who’s expressing concern, as the
Cleveland Plain Dealer reported yesterday. In response to a question after a speech, Toby Cosgrove said he wanted to ensure that manufacturers and investors would still be willing to make financial bets on unproven devices and drugs. He used the example of a heart valve, saying it now takes two decades to bring a new valve product to market and then assess the effectiveness.
(Cosgrove knows of which he speaks; his bio says he has 30 patents filed, including heart valves and surgical instruments.)
The concern he’s raising isn’t so much over the comparative research itself, but what the government does with the results. If regulations deem that only the treatment judged most effective is paid for, “my concern is that .. we begin to limit what people are willing to do in terms of developing new products,” Cosgrove said, according to the paper.
Two health-care experts interviewed by the Plain Dealer said they thought the government and insurance companies understood the need to safeguard innovation.
Last year both the NIH and IOM published lists of things they’d like to see studied under CER. Included were expensive biologic drugs for auto-immune diseases, treatments for atrial fibrillation, school-based anti-obesity programs and pregnancy-prevention strategies. The co-chair of the IOM committee told the Health Blog back then that CER includes figuring out what works best for certain subgroups — say by age or gender or ethnicity.
Comparative effectiveness bonus: Read why one expert is concerned that the emphasis on CER
