Journal of health services research & policy
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J Health Serv Res Policy · Jul 2017
Partnering to improve care: the case of the Veterans' Health Administration's Quality Enhancement Research Initiative.
Within many large health care organizations, researchers and operations partners (i.e., policymakers, managers, clinical leaders) join to conduct studies to improve the quality of patient care. Yet optimal approaches to conducting partnership research and evaluation are only beginning to be clearly defined. The Veterans' Health Administration (VA) Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI), funded by operations leaders and administered by the VA's research service, now has nearly two decades of experience in fostering research-operations partnerships for improving quality of VA care. The work reported here is part of a national evaluation of QUERI. Because individuals in research and operations often have differing backgrounds and perspectives, we aim to identify the main sources of tension in research-operations partnerships and strategies for maximizing partnership success, through the eyes of QUERI participants. ⋯ QUERI research and operations participants had largely concordant views on partnership tensions and approaches for improving partnership success. The fact that only researchers mentioned moving beyond recognition for the results achieved and only operations staff mentioned the importance of 'perspective-taking' suggests, however, that there may be unresolved tensions. These results suggest that researchers may benefit from better aligning of academic incentives with contributions to the health care organization and establishing formal recognition of operational impacts of research, while preserving some flexibility and independence of the research process.