Outcome Sciences – The Medical Information We Want – Evidenced Based Medicine

This is a very informative article/interview to find out what Outcome Sciences does, clinical outcomes and using patient registries. It is a public company and received stimulus funds. Outcome was a spinout from Harvard a few years back. Part of the work studies real world results and compares them to clinical trials/studies. As we all know clinical trials are a small limited group, so once the medication is out in the real world they collect even more data as everyone wants to know if it works, what are the real or other side effects that may not have shown in a trial.

Safety, effectiveness and and quality are the three focuses with their studies.

“Now it’s gone to another level, where companies feel they need to show effectiveness to get reimbursement for their products or to get a procedure reimbursed by insurers. So it’s gone from a “nice-to-have” to moving toward a “need-to-have.”

The Company is certified by Medicare to provide patient registries. Goals are to have real time information to decision makers; the patients, physicians and insurers. The information is available and stored with “cloud technology”. BD

How safe and useful are the drugs that we use? Physician Richard Gliklich, CEO of Outcome Sciences, was researching the real-world clinical outcomes of approved drugs and devices in the 1990s before there was much of market for that kind of information. Now the FDA and more than 2,000 other healthcare organizations around the world use the technology and services of Cambridge, MA-based Outcome to gather and analyze data that is shaping important healthcare decisions. And President Obama is making evidence-based medicine, and comparisons of treatments, a cornerstone of his healthcare reform plan.

Outcome Sciences got a big boost earlier this year when Congress passed the $789 billion economic stimulus package, which designated $1.1 billion for studies that compare the effectiveness of one treatment to another for the same illnesses—something known as “comparative effectiveness.” Add the current and potential business Gliklich expects from that appropriation to the demand for his firm’s technology and services for post-market safety and physician performance studies, and it’s no wonder why he said the company has generated greater than 50 percent annual growth in the past few years. (Outcome is privately held and does not release specific financial information.)

Gliklich, who is also a surgeon at Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary, is a heavy hitter in the world of post-market studies. He and Nancy Dreyer, chief of scientific affairs at Outcome, were authors and senior editors for a definitive guide—published in 2007 by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)—on how to develop and operate patient registries to report the outcomes of certain treatments. His company is also providing the patient-management software for the MassHealth Hospital Pay-for-Performance (P4P) Measures initiative launched in 2008 to improve care at hospitals in Massachusetts.