Health Effectiveness Research Center

Welcome! Health effectiveness research assesses the degree to which preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic healthcare interventions achieve their intended goals in clinical practice. Research has shown that health care providers sometimes vary widely in the preventive care and medical treatment they give to patients with similar health problems. This variation in practice can be examined to evaluate the effectiveness, cost and over- or under-use of specific health care interventions.

Uncertainty is now widely recognized as a major reason for practice variation as healthcare providers and patients make decisions in the absence of clear, evidence-based guidelines and recommendations. As a result, it is unclear whether many treatments are over- or underused in practice.

For example, during the 1990s, approximately seventy percent of the children with severe ear infections in the Iowa Medicaid program received antibiotics. Health effectiveness researchers are asking:

Is this rate of treatment too high or too low?
Should policy-makers stress increased antibiotic use or more judicious use?
Which children are apt to gain from antibiotic treatments?
How can an intervention program to change antibiotic use rates be designed to provide optimal outcomes?
What are the subsequent effects of an intervention to change antibiotic use on treatment failures?