: Hospitals are the site of intensive use of drugs, biological products, and devices, with a major impact on both the outcome and cost of care. In the past decade, hospital care has begun a major transformation through the increasing use of clinical information systems and systematic approaches to improving safety and quality, and the rapid growth in the number of physicians specializing in hospital care, including intensivists and hospitalists. In the next decade, new basic and translational technologies, such as pharmacogenomics and clinical informatics, hold promise to bring a new era of personalized medicine to the hospital setting. This makes the production and dissemination of knowledge about the effective and cost-effective use of hospital therapeutics especially timely and important. The purpose of this application is to request support to establish a Center for Education and Research on Therapeutics (CERT) focused on hospital medicine with a major methodological focus on clinical economics. These are identified in the CERT Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) as high priority areas. In addition, there will be a secondary focus on personalized medicine, another high-priority area. The overall aim of the Hospital Medicine and Economics CERT will be to create a powerful education and research infrastructure to produce and disseminate knowledge to improve the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the use of therapeutics in hospitals, including drugs, biological products, and devices. The Hospital Medicine and Economics CERT will be based at the University of Chicago (UC), which has unique qualifications in both hospital medicine research and in clinical economics, as well as in personalized medicine. The Hospital Medicine and Economics CERT will also benefit from the participation of the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC) School of Pharmacy, which already collaborates with UC and AHRQ in this area through the Developing Evidence to Inform Decisions about Effectiveness (DEcIDE) program. In addition, the Hospital Medicine and Economics CERT will benefit from collaboration with Consorta, Inc, a national network of over 500 hospitals, and the ability to draw upon a pre-existing multicenter hospital medicine research group led by UC (including investigators at Brigham and Women's Hospital, the University of California-San Francisco, the University of Iowa, and the University of Wisconsin). The Hospital Medicine and Economics CERT will also gain national scope and impact through an important partnership with the Society of Hospital Medicine, and through affiliation with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC).
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