NAC Member Profiles
Alison Rein: Moving Research into Practice
AcademyHealth and INQRI share common goals: improving the health care system through research, and translating research into policies or programs that improve the care that patients receive. As a senior manager at AcademyHealth, Alison Rein works on several projects that examine how to involve consumers in quality-improvement efforts. Rein, a member of INQRI's National Advisory Committee, also has been at the forefront of state and national efforts to improve health care data exchange through health information technology systems. Rein spoke with us recently about the importance of INQRI grantees' research, and how this research can move beyond academia to create change.
Q: How did you come to be interested in the work of INQRI?
Rein: At the time I was invited, I was working for a consumer organization and very focused on improving heath care through health information technology. Equally important in the [IT] infrastructure is the way it's deployed. The actual provider and user who most often touches the patient is the nurse.
Q: Why is it important to have this research in the field? What's been missing from nursing quality research?
Rein: There's been a broad acknowledgement that in health care we have a number of workforce issues and potentially huge challenges to surmount in the coming years. It's important to have an evidence base to support any change to the way we design our health care delivery system. The impetus behind this program is to demonstrate the critical importance of nurses and the extent to which their contributions have an impact on the quality of patient care.
Q: How do grantees make sure their research doesn't just sit on the shelf, but instead has an impact on health care?
Rein: One of the strengths of the INQRI program is that they've always made dissemination a priority.
My advice is to think in advance of what you want to communicate and your audience beyond the typical academic researcher. I would always like to see more direct dissemination of these findings where applicable to the consumer community.
As more health care providers and systems start to have some sort of mechanism for directly communicating with their patients, to the extent that they customize that content or want to provide people with alerts about their quality improvement efforts, that would be an interesting and compelling place for grantees to make a difference.
Q: What roles do nurses play in advancing quality improvement activities?
Rein: There is so much more interaction people have with nurses and behind the scenes work. It's absolutely critical that we study more closely nurses' role — as the glue that binds — but also from the patient and societal perspective. Maybe that's how we start to make a shift in how we care for patients. Without that evidence base, we won't be able to get there.