Federal Government Selects Thomson Reuters to Build Tool That Streamlines Comparative Effectiveness Research

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Oct 14, 2010, 01:00 ET

ANN ARBOR, Mich., Oct. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) has selected Thomson Reuters to develop a secure, interactive tool that will enable researchers to perform comparative effectiveness studies without the need for professional computer programming.

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Comparative effectiveness research (CER) evaluates medical treatments to determine which work best in real-world settings. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act allocated $1.1 billion to support CER. ASPE administrators believe that a tool that summarizes data files without the need for complicated programming will facilitate CER.

CER studies often depend on aggregating data housed in disparate databases — which requires researchers to start each study from scratch and to process, clean, and format administrative data. This project is designed to build a tool that will simplify that process by making the clinical and administrative health information housed in federal and state databases and the Thomson Reuters MarketScan® databases accessible to researchers using next-generation analytical applications.

The Thomson Reuters MarketScan databases house integrated patient-level data for populations covered by commercial insurance, Medicaid, and Medicare supplemental plans. This information includes inpatient, outpatient, drug, laboratory, and other data reflecting real-world treatment patterns and costs.

As part of the project, Thomson Reuters will develop a pilot system linking multiple healthcare data sources and test it by conducting two high-priority analyses on care delivery options for selected medical conditions.

About Thomson Reuters

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SOURCE Thomson Reuters