Thursday, March 08, 2007

Bridging the gap between research and change in practice

Charcot teaching about hysteria
The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) have initiated a collaboration, funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that will make it easy for health care professionals to review and discuss research findings from recent JAMA articles with the author. The participants of this Author in the Room program will be surveyed later to determine the degree to which they have implemented appropriate chnages in their practice. Participation is free and is by conference call (you have to register). The March 21 program will be on "Development and Validation of Improved Algorithms for the Assessment of Global Cardiovascular Risk in Women: The Reynolds Risk Score."

This is different sort of program than just your average CME event. The goal is to learn something that can be applied today in your practice to improve the health of your patients.

I hope we start to see more of this type of collaboration and effort to translate research findings into current patient practice. I also hope that this process isn't hijacked by Big Pharma into another marketing avenue (though it would seem hard to prevent).

If I see that JAMA is doing one of these programs for a psychiatric illness, I will let you all know.

No comments: