Markets in knowledge about benchmarking in healthcare

Markets in knowledge about benchmarking in healthcare:     Barry Meier's reporting in the June 23rd New York Times (www.nytimes.com) entitled "A Choice for the Heart: It's Easier to Get Data on a Car than on a Medical Device",  points out the need for better information-mining in areas that  show how competing drugs and medical products compare in both safety and effectiveness.   This article should help us return to a modern discussion about health care, one that suggests that reformers can advocate strategies that improve health care quality   and produce cost containment simultaneously if the information benchmarking treatments was better mined.   The market in knowledge about health-care effectiveness suggests a number of new business models and corresponding opportunities for venture capital firms.  A recent conference at Harvard Business School reported a relatively increasing venture capital interest in medical devices,.  However, there continues to be an unexploied opportunity to create companies mining and analysing data concerning the effectiveness and cost of various health care procedures to insurance companies, governments and consumers.  (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=3917&sid=-1&t=special_reports_equity2004 )