Smoking-attributable medical expenditures by age, sex, and smoking status estimated using a relative risk approach.

Objective: To accurately assess the benefits of tobacco control interventions and to better inform decision makers, knowledge of medical expenditures by age, gender, and smoking status is essential.

Method: We propose an approach to distribute smoking-attributable expenditures by age, gender, and cigarette smoking status to reflect the known risks of smoking. We distribute hospitalization days for smoking-attributable diseases according to relative risks of smoking-attributable mortality, and use the method to determine national estimates of smoking-attributable expenditures by age, sex, and cigarette smoking status.

Managing personal health information in distributed research network environments.

Background: Studying rare outcomes, new interventions and diverse populations often requires collaborations across multiple health research partners. However, transferring healthcare research data from one institution to another can increase the risk of data privacy and security breaches.

Methods: A working group of multi-site research programmers evaluated the need for tools to support data security and data privacy.

Building a virtual cancer research organization.

Background: The Cancer Research Network (CRN) comprises the National Cancer Institute and 11 nonprofit research centers affiliated with integrated health care delivery systems. The CRN, a public/private partnership, fosters multisite collaborative research on cancer prevention, screening, treatment, survival, and palliation in diverse populations.

Methods: The CRN's success hinges on producing innovative cancer research that likely would not have been developed by scientists working individually, and then translating those findings into clinical practice within multiple population laboratories.