The National Education and Research Center for Outcomes Assessment in Healthcare (NERCOA) was established in 1991 with funding from the United States Public Health Service.
Originally created to link research, clinical practice and education for health professionals, the Center has three major goals:
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As the health care industry increasingly is required to evaluate the effectiveness of patient treatment, new studies and outcome measures are needed to document cost-effectiveness and improved quality of life.
NERCOA offers patient-centered, multidimensional outcome measures and economic assessment in clinical studies to evaluate therapeutic and pharmaceutical interventions.
These clinical studies and analyses assist health care providers in making more informed treatment decisions. Current research studies include the following:
To facilitate the implementation of multidimensional health status measures in clinical practice, NERCOA produces a variety of educational formats:
NERCOA is contributing to the field of outcomes assessment by conducting the following projects which encourage the use of outcome measures by health providers:
Dr. Barr is a graduate of Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Health Policy and Management, concentrating in health services research, including decision analysis and economic evaluations. She is associate professor of pharmacy administration and medical laboratory science at Northeastern University, and serves as a consultant to the Centers of Disease control, pharmaceutical industries, health care institutions and universities.