Healthcare Management
Clinical Data as the Basic Staple of Health Learning
Because of their potential to enable the development of new knowledge and to guide the development of best practices from the growing sum of individual clinical experiences, clinical data represent the resource most central to healthcare progress (Arrow et al., 2009; Detmer, 2003). Whether captured during product development activities such as clinical research trials and studies, or as a part of the care delivery process, these data are fundamental to the delivery of timely, appropriate care of value to indi- vidual patients—and essential to building a system that continually learns from and improves upon care delivered. The opportunities for learning from practice are substantial, from improved understanding of the effects of different treatments and therapies in specific patient subpopulations, to developing and refining practices to streamline or tailor care processes for complex patients, to the development of a delivery system that can advance the evidence base on novel diagnostic and therapeutic techniques (Hrynaszkiewicz and Altman, 2009; Nass et al., 2009; NRC, 2009; Safran, 2007). Furthermore, U.S. per capita healthcare costs are now nearly double that of comparable nations (Health care spending in the United States and OECD countries, 2007), and broader access and use of existing and future clinical data may be a key opportunity to better understand and address system-wide factors—such as waste and inefficiencies—that contribute to rising healthcare expenditures.
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