UConn Awarded New Federal Center

Storrs, CT (10/17/2007) - A new federal center to be established at the University of Connecticut may help determine which treatments your doctor recommends and which prescription drugs your health plan covers.

The five-year center also has the potential to immerse UConn faculty, honors students, graduate students and research fellows in up to 1 million dollars of federally-funded work each year.

The UConn center, to be led by the School of Pharmacy in collaboration with the School of Business and Hartford Hospital, is one of 14 Evidence-based Practice Centers nationwide. Other institutions that run such centers include Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Tufts University-New England Medical Center.

The centers are charged, by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, with conducting comprehensive, systematic reviews of research on health topics of vital importance to the U.S. healthcare system, and advising federal and state policymakers, professional organizations, and insurance companies on the highest quality, most effective, and most cost-effective healthcare treatments and delivery options.

Many of the topics the new UConn center will review include common medications, exorbitant treatments and those particularly significant for Medicare and Medicaid populations.

The UConn center adds a unique perspective to the EPC program because of the pharmaceutical expertise of its scientific team, noted its director, associate professor of pharmacy practice C. Michael White, an expert in cardiac medicine.

“Pharmacists are healthcare’s medication experts and, as such, the profession possesses insights into patient care that often are underrepresented among leaders formulating the nation’s healthcare policies,” White said.

“Having pharmacists, physicians and healthcare policy experts all working together will benefit everyone,” he said. “You need to have practitioners from all healthcare disciplines involved in deciding which questions you ask to provide the best, most useful answers.”

Dr. Jeffrey Kluger of Hartford Hospital will be the center’s associate director and assistant professor of pharmacy practice Craig Coleman will be the center’s project manager.

Assistant finance Professor John Vernon, who recently completed an appointment as senior economic policy advisor to the Office of the Commissioner at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, will be the new center’s health policy chief.

White, Kluger and Coleman have been collaborating for almost a decade, resulting in nearly 200 peer-reviewed publications including lead articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

“There can be so much conflicting research out there,” said Coleman, an expert in pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research.

“Often, practicing physicians and pharmacists aren’t aware of all of the available research or the latest study is the one they remember best. The key is that we’ll be looking at all the clinical evidence as a whole, looking at the economic repercussions of our findings, and making the best healthcare policy recommendations possible.”


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