Comparative Effectiveness Research: A Report From the Institute of Medicine

On 30 June 2009, another milestone was achieved inprogress toward a national system to promote medi-cal research that focuses on decision making by physicians and patients. The first steps occurred in late 2007 and early 2008 with a seminal article (1) and an Institute of Medi-cine (IOM) report that called for a national initiative of research that would support better decision making about interventions in health care (2). One of us was a coeditor of the IOM report. A third milestone was reached when both presidential candidates endorsed this concept. A fourth milestone came when the president signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA); this act allotted $1.1 billion to support this form of research, which had become known as comparative effec-tiveness research (CER). The legislation created a federal council on CER and asked the IOM to elicit input from