Researchers to use Medicare data to evaluate treatments

The information that exists in Medicare billing records, patient registries and electronic health records could help answer one of the most common questions in modern medicine: How well does one treatment work compared with another? Purushottam "Prakash" Laud, a professor of biostatistics at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and a group of colleagues at the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of Texas have a three-year grant for nearly $1.2 million to develop software to help make better use of the information from Medicare billing records and other large databases. (JOURNAL SENTINEL, 9/6)