Assessing the Long-Term Impact of Public Investments in Comparative Effectiveness Research: Conceptual Framework and Lessons Learned
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Assessing the Long-Term Impact of Public Investments in Comparative Effectiveness Research: Conceptual Framework and Lessons Learned

Published: Dec 30, 2014
Publisher: Journal of Comparative Effectiveness Research, vol. 3, no. 6
Health Research and Evaluation Evaluation Design Policy Analysis
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Authors

Eugene C. Rich

Dominick Esposito

Laura D. Kimmey

Christal Stone Valenzano

Pierre L. Yong

Key Findings

Key Findings:

  • The conceptual framework notes environmental factors and activities funded by ARRA CER. It lists process outputs, intermediate societal impacts, and long-term societal impacts while considering mediating factors and changes in external factors that shape the CER landscape.
  • Enumerating journal publications associated with ARRA CER projects could provide a quantifiable set of metrics of intermediate-term project products; however, technical challenges (for example, lack of standardization in grant numbers) and conceptual challenges (for example, not all ARRA CER projects involved project directors with the same motivation or opportunity to publish) remain.
  • Social network analysis may be useful for describing existing CER collaborations and changes in them over time, but using it to examine the association between characteristics of collaborations and projects’ intermediate and long-term societal impacts will require overcoming both conceptual and methodological hurdles.
  • Surveys of investigators and other members of the project teams could be a source of data for future evaluations, but it is difficult to use population surveys as an element of stakeholder input for the assessment of CER investments.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 directed $1.1 billion to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) for support of comparative effectiveness research (CER). As part of this investment, DHHS commissioned a midstream evaluation of the ARRA CER portfolio. One goal of the evaluation was to identify issues to consider for a future evaluation of the long-term impact of this portfolio and other CER investments. In planning the ARRA CER evaluation, we developed and revised a conceptual framework and related policy research questions that might be useful in future efforts to assess the impact of CER or patient-centered outcomes research investments. In addition, we explored methodological challenges related to designing an evaluation to assess investments in CER that may be informative to any future plans to evaluate the long-term impact of ARRA CER as well subsequent investments made from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund.

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