In addition to extending coverage to an estimated 31 million US residents, the recently passed HR 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, has ensured a future for comparative-effectiveness research (CER) by legislating funding, at $500 million per year, for the indefinite future.

The stimulus bill launched the CER initiative with seed funding and required the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to identify a list of high-priority CER topics. Most recently, an article by VanLare et al¹ described a five-step process for determining how to translate those 100 priorities into a portfolio of specific research projects (see Additional Reading).

ImagingBiz spoke with one of the authors, Harold C. Sox, MD, cochair of the IOM committee to set national priorities for CER, about its role in decision making, its potential use in answering imaging questions, and the recent controversial mammography recommendations of the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), which he chaired in the early 1990s.

Continued on Imaging Biz