Patients and their health care providers have many options when deciding on a treatment plan. Sorting through large volumes of information is difficult and time consuming for physicians and patients alike. This has created a need for synthesized research conducted and compiled by objective experts. Recognizing this vacuum, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has taken a leading role in developing and widely disseminating comparative effectiveness research (CER), a type of patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR),2 and sharing it with decisionmakers, including clinicians, health care system administrators, business leaders/purchasers, and consumers.
AHRQ is testing new approaches to disseminating PCOR that promote awareness of the Effective Health Care (EHC) Program and, collectively, reach AHRQ's priority audiences. These strategies include academic detailing, continuing education, media and marketing, partnership development at national and regional levels, and "virtual centers." Go to Appendix A, "Introduction and Background," for a more detailed description of these strategies.
The goal of the evaluation contract is to assess secular trends in consumer and clinician awareness of CER and specific CER topics. Specifically, the data collection effort will ascertain: 1) if and how levels of awareness, understanding, use, and perceived benefits of CER are changing and 2) trends in awareness of AHRQ's EHC Program. Using a computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) survey and a mail survey, respectively, the IMPAQ/Battelle (the "IMPAQ team") assessed levels of awareness and use of CER among consumers and clinicians at two points in time. This report focuses on the second data collection phase (wave 2) and presents a longitudinal analysis of the wave 1 and wave 2 consumer and clinician survey data.
2 In the consumer questionnaire, rather than using the terms "CER" or "PCOR," the survey instruments refer to the "concept of evaluating treatment options." In the clinician questionnaire, the terms "comparative effectiveness research" and "patient-centered outcomes research" were used, but their abbreviations were not. For expediency, in this report we refer simply to "CER."
Return to Contents
Proceed to Next Section