Recently a great deal of discussion at all levels of government and throughout the medical field has focused on comparative effectiveness research (CER). A goal of CER is to identify the best therapies for individuals and ultimately to improve our health care system. While much of the focus has been on developing pragmatic clinical trials, there remains a role for observational studies. I plan to present the design and results from observational studies of drug-eluting stents and bare metal stents for patients with coronary artery disease. A key feature of the examples is the difficulty determining the optimal dose and duration of anti-platelet therapy in these patients. The role of inverse probability weighted estimators and sensitivity analyses will be discussed in the context of the stent studies.
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