Percutaneous Coronary Interventions (PCI) versus Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery (CABG) for the treatment of Coronary Artery Disease
Problem
New medical technologies are emerging at a rapid pace and are quickly being incorporated into the healthcare community. Often times however, there remain unanswered questions are to the effectiveness of these new and often more expensive technologies as compared to the previous treatment option. Many of these evidentiary gaps are identified in Comparative Effectiveness Reviews, EPC reports, and other systematic reviews. The amount of effort devoted to addressing these evidentiary gaps within these reviews and reports is variable however, and there is not yet a well-defined, systematic approach to translating an evidence report into a prioritized research agenda.
One set of technologies that fits this description is Percutaneous Coronary Interventions (PCI) versus Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery (CABG) for the treatment of Coronary Artery Disease.
Project
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), has commissioned CMTP to translate the findings from a recently published Comparative Effectiveness Review into a prioritized research agenda. Specifically, CMTP will:
- Develop a reproducible, methodologically robust and user-friendly framework for prioritizing critical knowledge gaps identified through systematic reviews of existing evidence, which can be applied to different clinical areas and types of evidence synthesis.
- Convene a multi-stakeholder workgroup to produce a prioritized list of research questions reflecting gaps in the evidence identified through the Comparative Effectiveness Review– “Priorities for Evidence Development”. This list will be accompanied by preliminary thoughts on appropriate study design and value-for-money estimates for the high priority research questions (subject to data and resource limitations).
Project History and Current Status
With the help of the multi-stakeholder group (the working party) and other project consultants, CMTP has collated a list of evidentiary gaps pertaining to the clinical use of the aforementioned technologies. Each item on the list was transformed into a researchable question and an iterative nominal group process was used to prioritized these questions. Following the prioritization process, the working party members, along with CMTP staff, considered appropriate study design and feasibility of addressing those questions that ranked highest among the working party members.
We are currently in the process of writing a report of this project, which will be submitted to AHRQ in August of 2008.
