WASHINGTON – WASHINGTON – Comparing the effectiveness of various drugs, treatments and devices will be the key to reining in out-of-control healthcare costs, according to top healthcare leaders who spoke at the eHealth Initiative's Fifth Annual Conference last month.

Gail Wilensky, senior fellow at Project HOPE and former healthcare financing administrator, said with the way Medicare is structured today, "it is impossible to be efficient." Wilensky is also the former chairperson of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

What America needs is comparative effectiveness of bundled treatments needed for a single condition. Medicare shouldn't pay for one treatment or intervention at a time, she said.

Wilensky called it a dynamic process where "the role of IT will very much be that of an enabler." The idea is to reward doctors who provide high quality care at lower costs. Data on best practices will be compared and conveyed via healthcare IT.

Wilensky's push for comparative effectiveness was mirrored by other speakers at the eHealth conference.
Mark McClellan, MD, director of the Engelberg Center for Health Care at Brookings Institution and former administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said healthcare IT must be coupled with any effort for healthcare reform based on cost and effectiveness comparison.

Janet Corrigan, president and CEO of the National Quality Forum, a nonprofit collective of 350 organizations, said healthcare quality is not improving at an acceptable pace and the United States "still has the same fragmented, clunky delivery system."

Corrigan predicted that over the next five years, performance measurement reporting and clinical decision support will grow at an aggressive pace.