Title

Authors

Affiliation

¹Division of Oral Biology & Medicine, UCLA School of Dentistry, and Evidence-Based Decisions Study Group, Evidence-Based Decisions in Dentistry Practice-Based Research Network (EBD-PBRN.org); ²AAAS Fellow, Fulbright Specialist, ADA EBD Champion, UCLA School of Dentistry, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1668

Email

fchiappelli@dentistry.ucla.edu; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Editorial

Date

Received March 30, 2012; Accepted April 07, 2012; Published April 13, 2012

As a direct benefit of the Health Care Reform Act (2010), concerted effort has been deployed to define and characterize the process by which the best available evidence for diagnosis or treatment intervention prognosis can be obtained. The science of research synthesis in health care has established the systematic research protocol by which randomized clinical trials and other clinical studies must be reviewed and compared for the level and quality of the evidence presented, as well as the consensus of the best available evidence synthesized and shared. This process of systematic review yields a reliable and valid approach in comparing different interventions and strategies to prevent, diagnose, treat and monitor health conditions in terms of efficacy, and or of effectiveness. The resulting bioinformation outcome of comparative effectiveness and efficacy research review of the available clinical data is expressed as a consensus of the best available evidence, which finds its way in evidence-based clinical practice guidelines, standards of care and eventually, in policies: hence, the acronym CEERAP (comparative effectiveness and efficacy review and policy). The methodological and the procedural criteria that determine and regulate the public reporting dissemination of this sort of bioinformation, and the extent of benefit to the patient’s health literacy, which have remained a bit more elusive to this date, are investigated and discussed in this paper.

Keywords

Best available evidence, systematic review, comparative effectiveness and efficacy review and policy (CEERAP), evidence-based decisions, dissemination, public reporting, health literacy.

Citation

Barkhordarian et al. Bioinformation 8(7): 293-295 (2012)
 

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.