ABSTRACT
Collaboration between policy, research, and clinical partners is crucial to achieving proven quality care. The Veterans Health Administration has expended great efforts towards fostering such collaborations. Through this, we have learned that an ideal collaboration involves partnership from the very beginning of a new clinical program, so that the program is designed in a way that ensures quality, validity, and puts into place the infrastructure necessary for a reliable evaluation. This paper will give an example of one such project, the Lung Cancer Screening Demonstration Project (LCSDP). We will outline the ways that clinical, policy, and research partners collaborated in design, planning, and implementation in order to create a sustainable model that could be rigorously evaluated for efficacy and fidelity. We will describe the use of the Donabedian quality matrix to determine the necessary characteristics of a quality program and the importance of the linkage with engineering, information technology, and clinical paradigms to connect the development of an on-the-ground clinical program with the evaluation goal of a learning healthcare organization. While the LCSDP is the example given here, these partnerships and suggestions are salient to any healthcare organization seeking to implement new scientifically proven care in a useful and reliable way.
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This project was funded by the Veterans Health Administration through the National Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.
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The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the Department of Veterans Affairs or the United States government.
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The authors declare that they do not have a conflict of interest. All authors are employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
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Wu, R.R., Kinsinger, L.S., Provenzale, D. et al. Implementation of New Clinical Programs in the VHA Healthcare System: The Importance of Early Collaboration Between Clinical Leadership and Research. J GEN INTERN MED 29 (Suppl 4), 825–830 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-014-3026-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-014-3026-3