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Comparative Effectiveness Could Save Medicare Billions, Study Says
The time is ripe for Medicare to use comparative effectiveness research to start paying equally for services that provide equivalent results without threatening patient choice, says a report in Health Affairs.
Setting definitions of equal effectiveness MUST consider issues of patient concomittant diseases, age, and allergic or adverse reactions to drugs and operative procedures. Academic institutions, for example, operate on patients that do not compare with those seen in community hospitals; patients with serious adverse drug reactions cannot be simply treated with statins for high cholesterols, etc.