Talk about "comparative effectiveness research" and who will use it and you're bound to mention the usual suspects: doctors, patients, insurance companies, the government. Missing from that list is none other than yours truly...the media.

Whenever a team of researchers publishes a new paper about a particular device or drug, there is a temptation to boil the study down to a headline: "Drug X could save you" or "Drug X could kill you." I realize not every media organization does this - certainly we don't do that here at the Nightly Business Report - but sometimes headlines can be misleading.

Take the two studies published on stents that I mention in tonight's broadcast. The studies do not say "stents don't work." They say for some patients, stents do not offer a measurable benefit over drug therapy, and so for those patients, paying for a stent probably doesn't make sense. Yet once these studies were picked up, several cardiologists I spoke with said they had patients tell them, "I don't want a stent. I've read they don't work."

I think comparative effectiveness studies will be extremely important in reforming the way we think about health care in this country. Who wouldn't benefit from knowing what works, and what doesn't? But I think we, the media, have a responsibility to report the results of those studies accurately, without oversimplifying the results. If a study finds that a certain type of arthritis surgery doesn't provide a benefit over drugs, we should report that - but we should also make sure we report whom that study included and omitted. Were women or minorities underrepresented? Does the finding apply to all patients or specific subgroups?

These studies will be a powerful tool in promoting better health care. We just need to make sure we're reporting the results responsibly.