Consumers United for Evidence-based Healthcare is a coalition of health advocacy consumer groups interested in evidence-based healthcare. It was formed in 2003. CUE provides leadership to other efforts aimed at involving patients in the research process, strengthening the voice of consumers in healthcare research, which has been called for over two decades but which has not always been successfully implemented free of commercial influence. By creating opportunities for networking and learning, similar to those available to health professionals, CUE members can be empowered and have an ongoing source of information and tools about health issues of concern. This would, at least in theory, give the member groups an edge in advocacy activities. Since its establishment, CUE members have been asked to testify on national committees, contribute letters to the biomedical literature, sit on national professional society steering groups and advisory panels and many other contributions.
CUE member organizations
As a condition of membership, CUE members may not receive the majority of their funding from commercial sources. All CUE members agree at the time of membership application to attend an annual CUE meeting to set priorities, receive training, and collaborate with other consumer and health advocates throughout the United States. CUE membership is currently about 50 member groups; the earliest members include the National Breast Cancer Coalition, Consumer Reports, and the Black Women's Health Imperative, among others.
CUE has hosted three Summit conferences, in 2007, 2010 and 2017, attended by health advocacy organizations and other key stakeholder groups. CUE also holds an annual membership meeting in Washington, DC and disseminates slidecasts from the meeting to the public. Past speakers have included:
Robert Califf
Vinay Prasad
Deborah Zarin
Diana Zuckerman
All of CUE's training materials are available free of charge to the public. CUE has produced these materials with the input of patients, consumers, guideline developers, and health professionals. The resources available on the CUE website are as follows:
Free Cochrane Courses
*Understanding Evidence-based Healthcare: A Foundation for Action
*The FDA and the Regulation of Healthcare Interventions
In keeping with its role as a consumer-scientist partnership, CUE maintains a clearinghouse function which matches consumers with healthcare professional organizations so that the consumer voice may be incorporated into important healthcare decisions. Past partnerships have matched consumer representatives into research implementation processes such as clinical guidelines panels, grant-writing, peer review, and conference workshops. Through the CUE Clearinghouse, health professional organizations can request consumer representatives for their research/research implementation projects and consumers can respond directly to those requests. Since 2007, CUE has fostered over 75 partnerships between consumers and policymaking organizations, including 12 in 2014 alone. In order to prepare all stakeholders for a panel with meaningful consumer engagement, CUE has created a series of short videos based on real-life interactions between professionals and patients participating on advisory panels. These videos demonstrate real-life scenarios and situations that professional guideline developers and consumer advocates serving on advisory panels are likely to encounter. They focus on specific steps in the advisory panel process such as preparing for a panel as a consumer, effectively moderating the panel as a Chair, and how to ensure that diverse opinions are heard, understood, and respected during advisory panel meetings.
