The Role and Scope of Comparative Effectiveness in Our Evolving Health Care System: Balancing Treatment Choices with Budget Reality

Advances in medical technology have revolutionized how health care is delivered in the United States. Innovative medical device manufacturers have contributed significantly to improved patient outcomes, their quality of life, and how physicians practice medicine. Consider how scopes moved many invasive, high-risk inpatient procedures to non-invasive, lower risk outpatient procedures. But these innovations come at a price. Makers of traditional medical devices and combination products (sophisticated technologies combining medical devices with drugs or biologics) spend millions upon millions of dollars annually to research, develop and ultimately market these new treatment options (pharmaceutical and biotech companies are of course, also part of this equation). Physicians and consumers alike are faced with an array of studies and promises of improved patient outcomes resulting from their use of such technologies.