With the passage of health care reform, the research community is ready to shift the national health policy conversation to a new dialogue on enhancing biomedical research and scientific innovation. In the past few weeks, discussion on topics such as the need to improve the translation of research discoveries into better health outcomes and the research ROI for improving the nation’s overall health have gained traction alongside continued analysis of the final health reform provisions.
At the recent Research!America National Forum, experts from across the government, industry, academia and patient advocacy sectors discussed priorities to speed translational research, improve health outcomes and ultimately, as panelist Dr. Robert Tijian, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute put it, identify new pathways to “move beyond therapeutics and treatment to prevention.” Yet transformation of this level requires a deep commitment to enhancing cross stakeholder collaborations and sustained communication, a challenge with so many players involved in the research process.
Views on improving engagement across the research enterprise were touched on throughout the forum. Dr. Carolyn Clancy, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), outlined the need to encourage better connectivity in order to improve outcomes and make more informed health decisions – connecting patients to physicians, public sector to private, data to the health care system, and researchers to the right targets to spur discovery and shrink innovation timelines.
Addressing the promise of more targeted approaches to enhance the development of new treatments and shorten the clinical trial process, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins highlighted the potential of genetic testing, personalized medicine and comparative effectiveness research (CER) to innovate new treatments and improve outcomes. Dr. Collins expanded on his Research!America remarks about the promise of genetics in an interview with The Washington Post:
“It’s going to be extremely interesting to see how [genetic testing] changes the landscape for personalized medicine. And particularly when it comes to pharmacogenomics, by which I mean picking the right drug for the right person at the right dose for the right time.”
As recently noted by Kaiser Health News, Dr. Collins is “committed to empowering researchers to move from scientific discovery to the development of new therapies,” a sentiment echoed by virtually everyone in the research community. Among the questions that will be leading the debate in the coming weeks is how to facilitate this connectivity and the use of technology, social media and other tools between researchers and patients alike to encourage the critical sharing of ideas necessary for biomedical innovation, large scale or small, to be realized. To watch the interview with Dr. Collins discussing CER, personalized medicine and other biomedical research hot topics, click here.
