National approaches to comparative effectiveness research

Recently, Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) has received considerable attention in the United States. This type of research has been underway in various settings for some time – most commonly as inputs to formal health technology assessment processes used to determine the medical, social, economic, and ethical issues related to the use of a health technology. As it is conceived in the United States, CER goes beyond health technology assessment, and encompasses research efforts that aim to encourage healthcare decision-making to be increasingly based on comparative evidence on clinical and humanistic patient-centred outcomes at both the individual and population levels. This chapter reviews the national approaches to conducting CER across various European countries in addition to Australia and Canada. Adopting an emerging United States-centric definition of CER, which focuses on clinical evidence...