Damn your yellow stick. Where are we going?
Worldwide, over US$100 billion is invested every year in supporting biomedical research, which results in an estimated 1 million research publications per year. […]
An efficient system of research should address health problems of importance to populations and the interventions and outcomes considered important by patients and clinicians. However, public funding of research is correlated only modestly with disease burden, if at all. Within specific health problems there is little research on the extent to which questions addressed by researchers match questions of relevance to patients and clinicians. […]
Although some waste in the production and reporting of research evidence is inevitable and bearable, we were surprised by the levels of waste suggested in the evidence we have pieced together. Since research must pass through all four stages shown in the figure, the waste is cumulative. If the losses estimated in the figure apply more generally, then the roughly 50% loss at stages 2, 3, and 4 would lead to a greater than 85% loss, which implies that the dividends from tens of billions of dollars of investment in research are lost every year because of correctable problems.
