Assessing Patient Management and Outcomes in Atrial Fibrillation: Does your health insurance plan know more than your doctor?

Citation :Sanjeev Saksena, April Slee.Assessing Patient Management And Outcomes In Atrial Fibrillation: Does Your Health Insurance Plan Know More Than Your Doctor? .JAFIB.2009 April;Volume 1 Issue(6): 383-387.

Assessing the landscape of any major public health challenge and the effectiveness of existing health care practices is a difficult proposition in any circumstance for health care planners and providers. To do so with relatively current health care data has not been a feasible reality. Too often health care planners have been relegated to use of venerable but dated clinical information. Equally often, clinical trial data collected for a purpose other than outcomes research have been extrapolated well beyond their original intent. The field of atrial fibrillation is no exception. The durable and well-reported Framingham study data have provided modern day framework for a natural history base of the disease over many decades . More recent analyses have shown worldwide similarity in patterns and increasing prevalence . The cascade of anticoagulant trials in the nineties with their metanalyses and methodology also provided outcome endpoints that have been widely used as a benchmark . More recently, NIH clinical trials such as the AFFIRM trial have provided some outcomes analyses . Yet these tools provide information that may have been captured some time ago and significantly lag current medical experiences and practice.