The Agency for Healthcare
Research and Quality (AHRQ) Effective Healthcare (EHC) Program funds individual
researchers, research centers, and academic organizations to work with AHRQ to
produce effectiveness and comparative effectiveness research for clinicians and
consumers.1 Comparative effectiveness research (CER) compares the benefits,
harms, and effectiveness of health interventions for the prevention, diagnosis,
treatment, and management of clinical conditions and the improvement of health
care delivery. The purpose of CER is to assist patients and consumers,
clinicians and other providers, and purchasers and payers to make informed
decisions that will improve health care at both the individual and population
levels.1
One EHC goal is to make CER
accessible to these decisionmakers. The Institute of Medicine’s list of 100
priority topics for CER highlights the importance of translating and
disseminating this research.2 The specific topic (“compare the effectiveness of
dissemination and translation techniques to facilitate the use of CER by
patients, clinicians, payers, and others”) was listed among the first quartile
of topics recommended for initial focus. Many hope that better communication
and dissemination of CER will result in more widespread use of such
information.
Coupled with these mandates is
the fact that the ad hoc Uncertainty Committee of the EHC Stakeholder Group is
interested in promoting effective ways to communicate uncertainty about health
and health care evidence to end-users. The committee would like to know what
approaches to conveying uncertainty increase the likelihood that audiences
receiving such information will understand it and be able to factor it into
their decisionmaking.
This systematic review has three
related components; all focus on promoting informed health and health care
decisions among patients and providers. First, it addresses the comparative
effectiveness of communicating the evidence in various contents and formats
that increases the likelihood that it will be understood and used by the target
audience. Second, it examines the comparative effectiveness of a variety of
approaches for disseminating the evidence from those who develop it to its
potential users. Third, it examines the comparative effectiveness of various
ways of communicating uncertainty associated with health and health care
evidence to different target audiences.
