Beyond Methods and Messenger to the Message

Randomized controlled trials, the gold standard, have been the backbone for 50 years of advancing medical knowledge to benefit patients.¹ More recently, it has become the gold standard to test selected health policy, health systems, and even economic ideas. The article by Goff et al in this month’s Pediatrics is an example of an elegantly developed and implemented randomized controlled trial to evaluate the efficacy of patient navigators providing low-income prenatal patients with traditional quality measures of pediatric practices to see if it would inform their choice of pediatric care.² The authors found that women in the intervention group were more likely to use this information presented by the navigator compared with a control group to make their decision to select a practice with higher clinical quality and patient experience scores. However, few women (5%) rated quality measures as among the most important factors in their selection. The...