You’ve either seen, heard or perhaps been involved in a situation where a family member asks to borrow money, and later you find out they took a weekend vacation that the lender could not afford. It’s natural that when you lend money to someone, you have some interest into their spending choices. Look at what happened to the auto industry executives who flew into Washington on private jets asking for money. Or the Northern Trust Bank’s golf tournament in California that raised such a hoopla. I don’t have a position on the rightness or wrongness of either private jets or golf tournaments, just that when people receive funds from other people, those other people have a new found interest into what the receiver does .
The government is going to be putting lots of money into healthcare, and similarly, will have increasing interest into how that money is being spent. Comparative Effectiveness Analysis of drugs, and devices is such a response. From what I’ve read, comparative effectiveness likely makes sense, but being an American, it makes me a little uncomfortable as well.
Business already do a great deal of analysis on drugs and products to assure that they have a competitive advantage over existing treatment, and thus a market. The cartoon below applies here as well. There is a large “step 2″ to comparative effectiveness as to how and under what conditions it applies; that needs to be clarified. One big element, it seems, is that comparative analysis assumes information technologies are in place through which to acquire the information and process the results. One has to wonder about the operational possibilities. How’s the miracle going to occur.
The Wall Street Journal has a nice piece on Comparative Effectiveness .
Just so you know, at the time this piece was written a query of Google for “comparative effectiveness” and healthcare returned 127,000 citations
