The journal Medical Care has published series of outstanding articles on emerging methods and tools to compare the effectiveness of medical therapies, prescription drugs, and devices. The peer-reviewed articles are an outgrowth from a symposium on comparative effectiveness research sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

Here are links to the individual articles in PDF format:

• Emerging Methods in Comparative Effectiveness and Safety: Symposium Overview and Summary.
• Medicare Part D Data: Major Changes on the Horizon.
• Methodologic Challenges to Studying Patient Safety and Comparative Effectiveness.
• Creating and Synthesizing Evidence With Decision Makers in Mind: Integrating Evidence From Clinical Trials and Other Study Designs.
• Improving Depiction of Benefits and Harms: Analyses of Studies of Well-Known Therapeutics and Review of High-Impact Medical Journals.
• Cluster Randomized Trials: Opportunities and Barriers Identified by Leaders of Eight Health Plans.
• Design of Cluster-Randomized Trials of Quality Improvement Interventions Aimed at Medical Care Providers.
• Designed Delays Versus Rigorous Pragmatic Trials: Lower Carat Gold Standards Can Produce Relevant Drug Evaluations.
• Practice-Based Evidence Study Design for Comparative Effectiveness Research.
• Studying Prescription Drug Use and Outcomes With Medicaid Claims Data: Strengths, Limitations, and Strategies.
• Assessment of Adherence to and Persistence on Disease-Modifying Antirheumatic Drugs (DMARDs) in Patients With Rheumatoid Arthritis.
• Out-of-Pocket Pharmacy Expenditures for Veterans Under Medicare Part D.
• Developing Indicators of Inpatient Adverse Drug Events Through Nonlinear Analysis Using Administrative Data.
• Real-Time Vaccine Safety Surveillance for the Early Detection of Adverse Events.
• Evaluation and Overview of the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System-Cooperative Adverse Drug Event Surveillance Project (NEISS-CADES).
• Using Inverse Probability-Weighted Estimators in Comparative Effectiveness Analyses With Observational Databases.
• A Simulation-Based Evaluation of Methods to Estimate the Impact of an Adverse Event on Hospital Length of Stay.
• Evaluating the Validity of an Instrumental Variable Study of Neuroleptics: Can Between-Physician Differences in Prescribing Patterns Be Used to Estimate Treatment Effects?
• Heterogeneity and the Interpretation of Treatment Effect Estimates From Risk Adjustment and Instrumental Variable Methods: Surgery for Early-Stage Breast Cancer.
• Increasing Levels of Restriction in Pharmacoepidemiologic Database Studies of Elderly and Comparison With Randomized Trial Results.
• Use of Propensity Score Technique to Account for Exposure-Related Covariates: An Example and Lesson.
• Using Propensity Scores Subclassification to Estimate Effects of Longitudinal Treatments: An Example Using a New Diabetes Medication.
• Adjustments for Unmeasured Confounders in Pharmacoepidemiologic Database Studies Using External Information.
• Comparison of Meta-Analytic Results of Indirect, Direct, and Combined Comparisons of Drugs for Chronic Insomnia in Adults: A Case Study.