Under Obamacare program, doctor visits would become data points

A new nonprofit is putting millions of Obamacare dollars towards an effort to turn routine doctor visits into a treasure trove of data on what medical treatments work best. The Affordable Care Act created the Patient Centered Research Outcomes Institute (PCORI) to support comparative effectiveness research, studies that identify the most effective treatments when a whole array of options might be available. PCORI announced Tuesday how it would move forward on that mission: spend $68 million to fund a network of health-care systems that cover as many as 12 million patients. The idea is to use all the doctor visits that already happen — and all the treatments that doctors prescribe — to figure out which ones do best for a certain type of patient.