Since 2016, QUERI investigators have worked closely with 68 VHA National Program Offices and VHA's 18 Veteran Integrated Service Networks (VISN)s to implement nearly 60 evidence-based practices and promising innovations. PEIs are designed to last multiple years and generate products such as evaluation reports, leadership briefings, training materials, and publications. Co-funding ensures operational investment and a focus on topics of high priority to operational leadership while also involving VHA health service research expertise. In addition to the funding provided by QUERI, a commitment of funds is also required by the VHA operational office collaborating with the field-based VA researchers conducting the evaluation.
15 PEIs are reviewed by scientific peer review panels and awarded to field-based VA researchers to conduct evaluations addressing areas of clinical priority in collaboration with VHA operational offices. Established in 1998, QUERI focuses on the deployment of implementation projects based on areas of national clinical priority and whose results can be directly translated into VHA care.12, 13, 14 A key initiative used by QUERI to bridge the researcher/implementer gap is the Partnered Evaluation Initiative (PEI) funding mechanism. These priorities have led to the development of the Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI).
Within VHA, high priority is placed upon ensuring healthcare research is directly applicable to care and is supported by the best available research evidence. 4, 5 When jointly-designed researcher/operational projects are able to overcome these challenges, they have had success in conducting rapid, rigorous evaluations which can quickly inform care delivery.6, 7, 8, 9 Given its focus on performance measurement, available data, and efforts to support a transformation into a Learning Health Care system, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is an ideal setting to conduct such jointly-designed research/operational projects. However, there is ample evidence of disconnects between researchers and implementers that create delays between discovery and implementation of healthcare breakthroughs.1, 2, 3ĭisconnects between researchers and implementers have been associated with differences in goal prioritization, evidence perspectives, product incentivization, and dissemination plans. Translating evidence into practice requires researchers to ask questions which address high-priority clinical concerns and healthcare policymakers to develop treatment guidelines which support the use of evidence-based interventions. Facilitators of effective collaboration included obtaining formal leadership support, developing a shared understanding of partner priorities and needs, ongoing discussions about resource needs, expanding collaborations beyond the initial project, having a clearly defined plan, planning for flexibility, plans for regular communication, and active participation in project meetings. One theme (mutual benefit) was mentioned by most investigators but only some operations partners, pointing to potential differences related to this area between the two groups. Most operational and investigator partners discussed the importance of leadership support, shared understanding, investment, trust and product agreement, suggesting that these may be more essential than other areas in supporting effective operations/research collaborations. The two years line is equivalent to journal impact factor ™ (Thomson Reuters) metric.Eight relationship themes were identified: leadership support, shared understanding, investment, trust, agreement on products, mutual benefit, adaptability, and collaboration. The chart shows the evolution of the average number of times documents published in a journal in the past two, three and four years have been cited in the current year. This indicator counts the number of citations received by documents from a journal and divides them by the total number of documents published in that journal.