With the advent of healthcare reform, the United States is embarking on an unprecedented effort to determine which health care intervention works best for the diagnosis or treatment of a given disease or condition. While comparative effectiveness and personalized medicine evolved separately, these significant trends interface, increasingly, in the healthcare systems.
Drs. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, and Carolyn Clancy, Director, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and more than 35 extraordinarily distinguished speakers from public and private sectors, are convening October 19-20, 2010, for ECRI Institute's 17th Annual Conference, Comparative Effectiveness and Personalized Medicine: An Essential Interface. The conference is being held on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.
This meeting, free with advance registration, explores two critical streams of scientific inquiry—comparative effectiveness and personalized medicine—in order to better align evidence, infrastructure, and database needs, to highlight research challenges, and to address many aspects about regulatory, ethical, and societal factors affecting both fields.
The conference is organized by ECRI Institute, the world's largest independent, nonprofit health technology assessment and patient safety organization, in cooperation with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), two central federal research bodies in the field of comparative effectiveness and personalized medicine. Senior leaders from Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Policy, Health Affairs, the Milbank Memorial Fund, and the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania played key roles in designing a program intended for multiple healthcare constituencies, including payers and providers, policymakers, researchers, industry, government, and consumer groups.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act emphasizes the importance of comparative effectiveness research in order to evaluate clinical outcomes across study populations. It also acknowledges the key role of personalized medicine in ensuring the capacity to identify both individual and subgroup differences within populations. The addition of personalized medicine will help researchers identify, and clinicians and patients better predict, which interventions will deliver the optimal treatment to the appropriate patient at the right time.
"People are individuals and people are statistics. Our healthcare system has to recognize both of these realities," says Jeffrey C. Lerner, PhD, President and CEO, ECRI Institute. "The conference will help us understand how to do this."
Conference sessions cover the methods and data sources that the fields of comparative effectiveness research and personalized medicine draw upon, especially as they interface. Case studies will be used to illustrate the approach to a specific disease category (cancer), the technologies used for a variety of other disease conditions, and the healthcare delivery challenges and approaches in hospitals and integrated delivery systems. Speakers will examine regulation and coverage and the interplay between these guardians of health and safety and the technology innovation so prized by the public. They will also address the societal implications of comparative effectiveness and personalized medicine.