LAUSR

2017 Re: Rich EC. From concept to policy: 10 years after the call for a US center for comparative effectiveness information. J. Comp. Eff. Res. 6(1), 9–11 (2017). Thank you for this interesting article [1]. I believe a paper that I co-authored with members of the Clinical Research Roundtable of the Institute of Medicine (now National Academy of Medicine) is also important to this discussion. It was published in 2005 [2], before the events in the Rich article. It described and recommended “a public-private consortium to expand and offer new capability and resources” in what we then called ‘effectiveness research’, now known as comparative effectiveness research. Although the paper recommended that this entity be housed in the Institute of Medicine, its form and function is essentially what turned out to be the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. A basic concept was to include a balance of the relevant stakeholders and interested parties instead of keeping them out. This paper and its concepts were known to the players, including legislative staff who were directly involved in the Affordable Care Act which enacted Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.