What's in Your Pipeline? The Feds Want to Know

The Agency for Health Care Research & Quality (the US government's de facto comparative effectiveness research center) is slowly but surely funneling out its portion of the $1.1 billion in stimulus money set aside for comparative effectiveness research last year.

Remember the stimulus money? It is supposed to be a down payment on health care reform--though lately it looks more and more like it may BE health care reform, for now at least.

Among the recent announcements, this one caught our eye: a request for bids to create a "horizon scanning system" for the agency.

No, this isn't some fancy pair of binoculars. AHRQ defines horizon scanning as "(1) the identification and monitoring of new and evolving healthcare interventions that are purported to or may hold potential to diagnose, treat or otherwise manage a particular condition; and (2) an analysis of the relevant healthcare context and landscape in which these new and evolving interventions exist in order to understand their potential impact on clinical care, the healthcare system, patient outcomes and costs."

The goal of the project is to "provide AHRQ with a systematic process to identify and monitor healthcare technologies that are likely to have a high clinical, system and cost impact in the US."

In other words, what is in the pipeline that we need to know about today to make sure that our comparative effectiveness research anticipates innovative technology.

This is a pretty big deal, if AHRQ can pull it off. The agency's director, Carolyn Clancy, explained the idea during The RPM Report's FDA/CMS Summit in December. "What I find amazing is that no developed country has figured out how to do this well so we are going to try to build a science in this area."

The goal of horizon scanning is not "academic navel gazing," she stressed. Rather, the agency wants "to anticipate what is on the horizon in the next three to five years and what kinds of questions might we be working to understand, even before the product is on the market, which patients are likely to benefit."

That may sound scary to some: Will the federal government be working to restrain uptake of new technology? It may also sound like an opportunity: if you have a breakthrough that truly transforms a treatment paradigm, maybe the feds will become champions for early adoption. For Clancy, it is the latter: This is "not intended in any way to discourage innovation," she told the FDA/CMS Summit. "Quite the reverse."

Whether horizon scanning is a threat, an opportunity, neither or both, we can't say for sure yet. But this we do know: if you aren't building comparative effectiveness research into your drug development plan, the federal government will try to do it for you.

image from flickr user Matti Mattila used under a creative commons license.