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DOI: 10.1055/s-2008-1080230
© 1999 by Thieme Medical Publishers, Inc.
Outcomes Research in Plastic Surgery: Review and Practical Issues
Publication History
Publication Date:
19 June 2008 (online)
ABSTRACT
The term outcomes research has been widely used in recent years to describe a branch of health care research that focuses on medical effectiveness. Effectiveness is distinguished from efficacy in that, where efficacy is the ability of a treatment to produce a physiological response in a controlled setting, effectiveness is a measure of the treatment's behavior under the actual prevailing conditions of clinical care. Outcomes research takes many forms, and has historically relied heavily on the use of administrative databases. Administrative data are not particularly helpful for following plastic surgery outcomes, which tend to be characterized more in the subtle in terms of quality of life than in the blunt indicators of length of stay and discharge status. We provide a discussion of the major forms of outcomes research and give some practical information on what kinds of outcome data and what research designs are most pertinent to plastic surgery.
Keywords
Outcomes research - quality of life - clinical research