Explaining Health Services Research

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Explaining Health Services Research
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What is Health Services Research?

• HSR is a multidisciplinary field of inquiry,
  both basic and applied, that examines the use,
  costs, quality, accessibility, delivery,
  organization, financing, and outcomes of health
  care services to increase knowledge and
  understanding of the structure, processes, and
  effects of health services for individuals and
  populations.
• Health Services Research Work Force and
  Educational Issues, 1995

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AHRQ 2002 Definition

• Health services research examines how people get
  access to health care, how much care costs, and
  what happens to patients as a result of this
  care. The main goals of health services research
  are to identify the most effective ways to
  organize, manage, finance, and deliver high-
  quality care reduce medical errors and improve
  patient safety.
• 
  

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AcademyHealth 2000 Definition
Multidisciplinary field of scientific
investigation that

• Studies how
• social factors,
• financing systems,
• organizational structures and processes,
• health technologies, and
• personal behaviors

• Affect
• access to health care,
• quality and cost of health care,
• and ultimately our health and well
• being

• In the following research domains
• individuals,
• families,
• organizations and institutions, and
• communities and populations

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HSR in the Headlines. . .
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The Importance of Health Services Research

• Health services research informs the efforts of
  voluntary health associations by
• Uncovering challenges faced by patients related
  to cost, quality, and access
• Identifying best practices that can be applied in
  health care delivery and care management
• Evaluating the relative safety, effectiveness,
  and cost of medical treatments
• Providing the necessary information to educate
  providers and empower patients and
• Generating credible evidence to buttress advocacy
  efforts

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Critical Need for Research Translation

• moving this knowledge off the shelves and into
  practice, making it relevant and accessible to
  practitioners and patients, achieving a true
  marriage of knowledge with intuition and judgment
  all this requires translation.
• Lenfant, Claude. Clinical Research to Clinical
  Practice Lost in Translation? The New England
  Journal of Medicine, 349, 2003, pp. 868-74.

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Building the Translation Highway

• Requires explicit investment
• Takes a combination of
• Push and Pull
• Linkage and Exchange
• Deserves priority in research funding allocation
• AcademyHealth, as the catalyst for the health
  services research-VHA linkage, stands ready to
  work with researchers, research funders, and VHAs
  on this critical need

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Concluding Thoughts

• Research on our health care system can save
  more lives in the next decade than bench science,
  research on the genome, stem-cell research,
  cancer vaccine research, and everything else we
  hear about on the news.
• Atul Gawande, M.D., Ph.D.
• June 2005