The article in this issue by O'Donnell et al stimulated my attention to the methods beyond randomized controlled trials that can help assess public health research and rank its utility in hierarchies of evidence. The future of public health policy research will surely combine computational power and the power of human ingenuity.
Keywords: RCTs (randomized controlled trials); community-based interventions; dynamic simulation modeling; hierarchies of evidence; participatory action research; positive deviance approach.