WILMINGTON, DE – The Integrated Research Network, a collaborative research community slated to launch this summer, will allow physicians to weigh in on comparative effectiveness research.

The IRN is being launched by HealthCore, Inc., the clinical outcomes research subsidiary of WellPoint, in preparation for prospective effectiveness research studies and potential comparative effectiveness grants from the $1.1 billion grant program administered by the National Institutes of Health, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The IRN is currently registering practicing physicians in internal medicine, family practice, general practice, rheumatology, cardiology, endocrinology, psychiatry, oncology and gastroenterology. Special areas of interest include heart failure, antibiotic resistance, autism, Type 2 diabetes and breast cancer.

"As a practicing cardiologist for more than a decade, I anticipate that the IRN will help practicing physicians determine disparities in care, deliver better quality of care and provide safety data beyond clinical trials," said Javed Butler, director of heart failure research for the cardiology division of the Emory University School of Medicine and a member of the IRN advisory board. "In my field, we can improve significantly on prevention aspects of cardiovascular disease and control of risk factors, which will help decrease the risk not only for heart failure but strokes and heart attacks."

HealthCore will work with the IRN to produce registries and studies focusing on product safety and observational and prospective effectiveness research.

"Not only will the IRN serve as the conduit for collecting information, but it will allow physicians to take a more hands-on role in shaping the studies," said Louise Short, IRN medical director for HealthCore. "Ultimately, the information the IRN produces will help healthcare providers personalize medicine for the individual patient and deliver safer, more efficient and higher quality healthcare."

Physicians will be compensated for their involvement in research studies and can work with the IRN on an ongoing basis as subject matter experts advising on the type of data to be collected, recording clinical information and participating in prospective and comparative effectiveness studies.

Officials say when the data collection for a study is complete, the information will be combined with HealthCore's administrative claims information – including medical and pharmacy utilization, eligibility and benefit level information and laboratory results on millions of patients – in order to analyze data and produce study results that can be applied in real-word medical practice.

"It's rare for research to combine administrative claims data with clinical data," said Short. "Yet, when we can integrate both types of data and draw on the clinical practice experience of hundreds of physicians in the IRN to make the data analyses more relevant, it helps us answer challenging medical questions in a way that is more relevant to everyday clinical practice."