Following President Obama’s State of the Union address and budget proposal, the national media spotlight remains focused on national health care reform and deficit reduction.

Tuesday’s New York Times noted, “The first priority noted by the Office of Management and Budget was to support health insurance reform by strengthening policy on the use of computerized records… financing research to compare the effectiveness of different medical treatments…”

The Spencer Trask network is the original underwriter of comparative effectiveness research in the form of a company called Health Dialog, which paid royalties to the founding father of comparative effectiveness research, Dr. John Wennberg.

Wennberg documented the fact that medical treatment variation exists across providers, with no statistically relevant difference in positive outcomes for high cost, aggressive providers and more conservative, lower cost providers. He concluded that much of the variation was unwarranted by medical evidence.

His research stresses the value of informed patients in a health care delivery system that emphasizes education and autonomy of the patient as an effective counterweight to a doctor’s incentive to be paid by procedure. By leveraging the comparative effectiveness research into actionable patient information, Health Dialog improved health care outcomes, patient satisfaction rates and reduced medical costs for insurers.

At this critical juncture in our nation’s history, politicians can follow Health Dialog’s lead as a proven reference point for commercially and socially viable reform. Health Dialog is the fastest growing health care management company and its 20 million patients report distinct improvements in the quality of their health care while their insurers see dramatic reductions in the incurred costs for medical procedures.

The Spencer Trask network of investors is firmly committed to looking beyond the horizon for innovative ideas that will change the way humanity lives for the better, and we are pleased with the example of Health Dialog – a company that has delivered infinite returns in terms of net worth, network and net worthiness.

The World Economic Forum wrapped up at Davos last week with universal agreement that we need to collectively question our current problem-solving methods.

In a session at the Forum last week, Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics observed, “Davos this year is framed around the idea that the world is busted.  We’re here to see if multi-stakeholder networks can solve problems” — singling out the growing significance of the open innovation marketplace.

His speech was close on the heels of another groundbreaking collaborative innovation challenge from our company, InnoCentive. Wired.com reported a new challenge on InnoCentive in which Harvard will use government funding to generate not only answers to medical challenges around Type 1 diabetes but questions that will spark new ways of thinking about the disease.

“We want questions as well as answers, and we need to get them from a broader community because the same old people asking the same old questions in the same old way with slightly newer technology is not moving things fast enough or broadly enough for us to cope with these incredibly complicated diseases,” said Dr. Eva Guinan, director of Harvard Catalyst Linkages and co-leader of this InnoCentive project.

“When the United States government funds a crowdsourced social network at the oldest university in the country to make medical research more effective, it’s hard to deny that the Obama administration is making good on at least part of its pledge to bring the government and the institutions in line with the latest technology,” reported Eliot van Buskirk on Wired.com.

We couldn’t say it better ourselves. Spencer Trask is focused on bringing together great minds and great talent to build the big ideas of tomorrow.  We’re excited by InnoCentive’s progress in this space and look forward to accelerated results in worth and worthiness as more sectors and geographies embrace the power of crowd-based innovation.