Emerging lessons from the drug effectiveness review project.
The Drug Effectiveness Review Project (DERP) is an alliance of fifteen states and two private organizations, which have pooled resources to synthesize and judge clinical evidence for drug-class reviews. The experience shines a bright light on challenges involved in implementing an evidence-based medicine process to inform drug formulary decisions: When should evidence reviewers accept surrogate markers and assume therapeutic class effects? How open and participatory should review procedures be? Should reviewers consider cost-effectiveness information? What is the appropriate role of the public sector in judging evidence? The DERP illustrates that attempts to undertake evidence-based reviews, apart from the methods themselves, which continue to evolve, involve questions of organization, process, and leadership.
Neumann
Peter J
PJ
Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health, Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies, Tufts-New England Medical Center, Boston,Massachusetts, USA. pneumann@tufts-nemc.org
D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D017723:Drug Utilization Review / Q000191:economics / Q000379:methods*; D017598:Efficiency, Organizational; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D005569:Formularies as Topic; D006265:Health Care Coalitions; D006801:Humans; D010865:Pilot Projects; D013810:Therapeutic Equivalency