Optimizing patient partnership in primary care improvement: A qualitative study.

Background: The need to expand and better engage patients in primary care improvement persists.

Purpose: Recognizing a continuum of forms of engagement, this study focused on identifying lessons for optimizing patient partnerships, wherein engagement is characterized by shared decision-making and practice improvement codesign.

Methodology: Twenty-three semistructured interviews with providers and patients involved in improvement efforts in seven U.

Gene drives as a response to infection and resistance.

Vector-borne infectious diseases continue to be a major threat to public health. Although some prevention and treatment modalities exist for these diseases, resistance to such modalities, exacerbated by global climate change, remains a fundamental challenge. Developments in genomic engineering technologies present a new front in battling vector-borne illnesses; however, there is a lack of consensus over the scope and consequences of these approaches.

Caveats for high reliability in healthcare.

Purpose Given the pace of industry change and the rapid diffusion of high reliability organization (HRO) approaches, lags and divergences have arisen between research and practice in healthcare. The purpose of this paper is to explore several of these theory-practice gaps and propose implications for research and practice. Design/methodology/approach Classic and cutting-edge HRO literature is applied to analyze two industry trends: delivery system integration, and the confluence of patient-as-consumer and patient-centered care.

A case for revisiting peer review: Implications for professional self-regulation and quality improvement.

Background: Quality improvement in healthcare has often been promoted as different from and more valuable than peer review and other professional self-regulation processes. In spite of attempts to harmonize these two approaches, the perception of dichotomous opposition has persisted. A sequence of events in the troubled California prison system fortuitously isolated workforce interventions from more typical quality improvement interventions.

The informed decisions toolbox: tools for knowledge transfer and performance improvement.

In recent years, spurred by developments in evidence-informed medicine, a movement to strengthen evidence-informed managerial decision making in healthcare organizations has emerged in the United States and in other countries. The drivers of this movement include demands by payers and consumer groups for improved quality of care, increased operational efficiency, and greater accountability from healthcare organizations. But numerous barriers to managers' use of evidence in decision making exist, including time pressures, perceived threats to autonomy, preference for colloquial knowledge based on individual experiences, difficulty accessing the relevant evidence base, reliance on external consultants (and others) to determine the quality of the information, and lack of resources.