News & Events

CERTAIN projects and programs depend on the input of stakeholders who will use evidence and results generated by CERTAIN to inform healthcare decisions. We spoke with one such stakeholder, Dr. Leonard Su, a vascular surgeon and an active partner in the CERTAIN PAD Study, to find out why he decided to join CERTAIN's efforts and champion CERTAIN activities among his colleagues and patients.

CERTAIN projects and programs depend on the input of stakeholders who will use evidence and results generated by CERTAIN to inform healthcare decisions. CERTAIN partners with a variety of different stakeholders, including patients, physicians, payers, and policymakers. The CERTAIN Patient Advisory Network involves patients, caregivers, and family members who are interested in being part of helping doctors and scientists make research better and more useful to patients. 

Mary Scott became involved in the CERTAIN Patient Advisory Network in October 2012. Since starting her work as a Patient Advisor, Mary has been an active contributor to CERTAIN. She attended our first 2 Patient Advisory Network meetings, contributed to the PAD Study by providing input on study documents aimed at patients, and worked with CERTAIN Patient Voices Project Senior Researcher Dr. Danielle Lavallee on a new funding proposal to the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) entitled, Comparing Engagement Techniques for Incorporating Patient Input in Research Prioritization. In this project, she helped conceptualize study operations, particularly in providing insight on how to best engage patients to provide input on research priorities. She also assisted in drafting patient materials for the proposal. Mary’s interest in being involved in the CERTAIN Patient Advisory Network stems from her desire to make a difference in the lives of people. She also harbors a great interest in the medical field and enjoys learning about and contributing to work to advance health. Most significantly, Mary partners with CERTAIN as a way to honor her daughter who recently passed away. Her daughter, an OB-GYN physician, was passionate about her work and active in the research community. In her spare time, Mary serves as the Editor of the Ellensburg, WA, city newsletter, "Town Talk."

The increasing integration of delivery systems provides an opportunity to manage the entire patient-focused episode of care and to assess the impact of care on patient outcomes, including patient-reported outcomes (PROs).⁽¹⁾ PROs are any report coming directly from the patient, without interpretation or influence by a clinician or caregiver, about how they function or feel in relation to their health, a specific condition or disease, or treatment.⁽²⁾ Patient interviews, self-completed questionnaires, diaries, or other data collection tools such as hand-held devices and web-based platforms are common approaches to obtaining such evaluations. 

The following are excerpts from an article that will be appearing in Proliance Outlook Magazine (April 2013):

Despite spending more money on healthcare than any other industrialized nation, the United States lags considerably behind in most measures of healthcare quality, outcomes, costs and efficiency. Our healthcare system lacks the components of a learning healthcare system, which would allow for continuous evaluation of healthcare practices, care delivery, and experiences or patients and providers and for continual feedback, learning and improvement. What is needed is a system that:

This article is the first in a series that examines what CERTAIN is doing to develop a true learning healthcare system in Washington State. Have a question about CERTAIN that you would like for us to cover in a future article? Let us know.

The United States spends more on healthcare than all other industrialized nations, but lags considerably behind in most measures of healthcare quality and efficiency. A 2012 Institute of Medicine report entitled, "Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America" cited multiple issues that contribute to US healthcare inadequacies. For example, the US spends over $100 billion each year on healthcare research, but most of this research does not help patients and doctors make better healthcare decisions. Furthermore, research evidence takes on average 12-17 years to be adopted into clinical practice, causing clinical care to lag far behind research-supported best practices. Even if research evidence was translated into clinical practice in a more timely manner, there is no performance surveillance system in place to monitor progress and outcomes of care. Finally, despite the billions of dollars being spent on research to improve healthcare, research studies are largely conducted by academic researchers who study questions that are important to them and their interests – questions that may not produce the information that patients and their doctors most need to make healthcare decisions.

What is needed is a system that tracks quality and cost, drives improvements in care by learning from the experiences of patients, is a mechanism for translating evidence into practice, and incorporates the voices of all healthcare stakeholders – patients, physicians, payers, and policymakers. These are the components of a learning healthcare system, and CERTAIN is the learning healthcare system developed in Washington State. CERTAIN is a suite of projects and programs, including:

AHRQ released a summary report on Closing the Quality Gap: Revisiting the State of the Science.

Peter Orszag, vice chairman of corporate and investment banking at Citigroup Inc. and a former director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama Administration, touts a "little noted provision...tucked in last week's fiscal-cliff legislation" in an op-ed for Bloomberg News<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-08/smart-health-care-strategy-hidden-in-cliff-deal.html> (1/9, 1M). Found in Section 601(b), the provision is "an incentive for doctors to expand their use of something called clinical data registries." These registries "collect information on patient characteristics, patterns of care and outcomes that can be crucial to evaluating what medical techniques and strategies work and which ones don't." He offers a few examples of these registries, like the American College of Cardiology Foundation's "National Cardiovascular Data Registry, which collects information on many kinds of cardiology care." Orszag urges HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to "make new registries for specialty care a priority," and encourage physicians to participate in them. He concludes, "early promotion of registries in those areas could yield ideas for" lowering costs.

Standardized pre-operative practices decrease patients' risks

CERTAIN is looking to fill temporary Manager position for the Patient Voices Project. The purpose of this position is to provide high-level program operations management and on-going customer-service relationship management for the Patient Voices Project (PVP). This position will primarily conduct high-level and independent operations to achieve a multitude of program objectives and project implementation for the PVP. For position details, visit the UWHires site uwhires.admin.washington.edu (Req#:91759)