Ka. Phillips et La. Bero, IMPROVING THE USE OF INFORMATION IN MEDICAL EFFECTIVENESS RESEARCH, International journal for quality in health care, 8(1), 1996, pp. 21-30
There is increased emphasis on improving the quality of health care by
obtaining and disseminating information about the effectiveness and o
utcomes of care and by facilitating more consumer input participation
in decision-making. We examine barriers to information use and the cha
llenges that these barriers pose for effectiveness research. We divide
our discussion into four goals of effectiveness research, These are:
(1) to provide more information so that consumers, providers and polic
ymakers can make ''rational'' decisions; (2) to incorporate patient pr
eferences into health care decisions; (3) to develop guidelines that i
ncorporate both individual perspectives and societal perspectives; (4)
to use information to improve the practice of health care. We discuss
four recommendations for improving the use of information: (1) the ev
idence on how people actually make decisions should be used to inform
the design and implementation of effectiveness research; (2) decision-
making should be structured through guidelines and policies; (3) crite
ria should be developed for determining which guidelines should fully
incorporate patient preferences; (4) safeguards should be established
to guard against misuse of information.