Issues

The National Pharmaceutical Council's research is focused on issues that are likely to have a significant impact on the pharmaceutical industry, such as the enactment of the health care reform law, the “Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act of 2010."

In this law, comparative effectiveness research (CER) is positioned to support the development of comparative evidence that will better inform health care decision-making; however, many questions remain about how the new law will be implemented. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) provided $1.1 billion in new public funds for CER and set in motion a series of activities including the development of federal priorities for CER and efforts to enhance the nation’s  research infrastructure to conduct CER in “real world” settings.  To help manage and augment the new public focus on CER, the 2010 health care reform law creates the non-profit Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) that is not an agency of government, but rather an independent organization with a multi-stakeholder Board of Governors and sustained public-private funding for CER that will reach nearly $650 million by 2014.

Much of NPC's recent and forthcoming research will take a look at the many questions that must be addressed in the creation of PCORI, such as the kinds of standards and methods that will be used in the generation and interpretation of CER; methods for the communication and dissemination of CER; and how health care outcomes are valued.

To learn more about these and other issues, please click on the navigation to the left of this page.