title: Emerging lessons from the drug effectiveness review project.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: 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
authors.forename: Peter J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Neumann
mesh_terms: 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