ANN ARBOR, Mich., Oct. 14 /PRNewswire/ — The U.S.
Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Planning
and Evaluation (ASPE) has selected Thomson Reuters to develop a
secure, interactive tool that will enable researchers to perform
comparative effectiveness studies without the need for professional
computer programming.

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Comparative effectiveness research (CER) evaluates medical
treatments to determine which work best in real-world settings. The
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act allocated $1.1 billion to
support CER. ASPE administrators believe that a tool that
summarizes data files without the need for complicated programming
will facilitate CER.

CER studies often depend on aggregating data housed in disparate
databases — which requires researchers to start each study
from scratch and to process, clean, and format administrative data.
This project is designed to build a tool that will simplify that
process by making the clinical and administrative health
information housed in federal and state databases and the Thomson
Reuters MarketScan® databases accessible to researchers using
next-generation analytical applications.

The Thomson Reuters MarketScan databases house integrated
patient-level data for populations covered by commercial insurance,
Medicaid, and Medicare supplemental plans. This information
includes inpatient, outpatient, drug, laboratory, and other data
reflecting real-world treatment patterns and costs.

As part of the project, Thomson Reuters will develop a pilot
system linking multiple healthcare data sources and test it by
conducting two high-priority analyses on care delivery options for
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