Comparative effectiveness research: guidelines for good practices are just the beginning.

The International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research formed a task force to gather state-of-the-art recommendations on good research practices for comparative effectiveness research using retrospective databases. The report of the task force was published in three sections in the journal Value in Health in December 2009, and addressed issues of design, analysis, framing the research question, and reporting and interpreting the findings from nonrandomized studies of treatment effects. This article will briefly examine the structure, process and outcomes of that task force, comment on the potential impact of the report in the context of comparative effectiveness research, and offer a few observations on the future of this field.