The Nashville, Tenn.-based Vanderbilt University Medical Center has opened the Center for Clinical Quality and Implementation Research with its core goal to study clinical quality improvement strategies, addressing not only the content of clinical care—prevention, diagnostics, therapeutics—but also the organization and workings of the care delivery system.
Housed within the Center for Health Services Research in the Institute for Medicine and Public Health, the new center will conduct research and assist Vanderbilt teams with the design, implementation and evaluation of clinical quality and safety initiatives. As the center gathers faculty and professional staff, teams from across the medical center will increasingly participate in the scientific study of clinical improvement projects, from inception to peer-reviewed publication, officials say.
“Our mission is to advance research on the quality, safety and delivery of healthcare,” the center’s director, Sunil Kripalani, M.D., associate professor of medicine, said in a news release. “As the medical center continues to implement clinical improvement projects, we’ll support the evaluation of this activity from a scientific standpoint. We will help develop and design approaches to improving quality based on theory and evidence, and assess the effectiveness of quality initiatives, including why and how a given strategy worked.”
Experts at the center will also initiate grant-funded research projects of their own, and help interested investigators with grant proposals. The center will also sponsor an implementation science research forum open to faculty, staff and students, and a research support core will be developed for VUMC groups that may want to engage dedicated services from the center.
“In addition to improving healthcare delivery, the center’s work holds great promise to advance research and improve individual health outcomes and overall population health,” added Russell Rothman, M.D., director of the Center for Health Services Research. Start-up funds for the center come from the Institute for Medicine and Public Health, led by Robert Dittus, M.D., senior associate dean for population health sciences.
