ABSTRACT
Outcomes research is the scientific study of the outcomes of disease therapies used for a particular disease, condition, or illness (1). The term outcomes research also refers to the study of a broad range of subjects: the status of the patient or population at entry into the healthcare system, the costs and financing of the healthcare given, or the status of the patient or population after treatment, and these types of outcomes research may be further described by the methods that are used to conduct the studies. For example, record-based outcomes research encompasses administrative or financial records that are studied to retrieve information on costs or outcomes of care. Record-based research can also involve systematic review (meta-analysis) in which results of several studies are considered and analyzed together. Other types of outcomes research such as patient-based outcomes research use data gathered from patients. In this discipline, the researcher may be interested in the patient’s perception of their outcome. Although traditional clinical outcomessuch as mortality, complication rate, etc.—remain important, outcomes research uses expanded measures such as quality of life (QOL), and disease-specific health status.
