Consumer Focused Health

I keep hearing about Comparative Effectiveness and how evidence needs to used in medical practice.  Then I remember my days in the clinic/hospital, where complex patients presented in ways that didn’t fit textbook definitions and whose multitude of issues offered contradictory readings from the literature.

So how are we to move forward?  I’m a strong believer that the best evidence needs to be used in clinical decision-making…the issue is in making this evidence usable in the field in a way that doctors can trust will be relevant to the person in front of them (as opposed to 300 carefully selected and studied patients in Finland).

So what will the new paradigm look like?  My sense is the RCT will fade as consumer-focused care comes into play.  If the best of science is directed to the patient sitting in front of a doctor, the goal will be to combine the information of others just like them (across multiple segments and disease phases) to predict both the natural course as well as the potential options for improvement (and their predicted results).

After all, isn’t it less important to know what a treatment does for the average study patient in Finland and more about what it does in people just like you in the real world?

Real-world data from Patients Like Me

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