Writing this chapter helped crystallize for me the opportunities that
academic health centers and researchers have to use their work
to address important societal questions. By that, I mean that we should
define the questions that society, patients, and healthcare need answered
and then work to provide evidence that will help inform policy.
The chapter underscores that it is not as simple as just generating
scientific data and evidence, and then the policy follows. It is not
evidence-based policy, but evidence-informed policy. As we generate
evidence, we need to put that in the context of local cultures, norms, and
economic realities and use the evidence in concert with policymakers
to inform and generate the best policy. Researchers and policymakers
need to work together. When those two worlds collaborate—when
policymakers bring their skills in understanding their constituents and
communities and combine that with the evidence that is generated by
researchers—the result is policy that is the most beneficial and effective.
Academic health centers and their leaders, faculty, and researchers need
to reach out beyond their own walls to connect with policymakers and
the community. Through meaningful conversations, researchers can
gain a deeper understanding of the context in which they are asking
their research questions. They can also develop a more intuitive sense of
how they can communicate their findings back to policymakers so that
research can be used most effectively to help generate policy.
In addition, academic health centers have an opportunity to look at
the kinds of questions they are asking. Are we addressing the questions
that society, communities, and policymakers really care about? Are we
asking the right questions? Are we asking them in the right way? Are we
generating the type of evidence that is truly needed? Only by careful
listening and by thinking in the complex way that policymakers have to
think can we be the most useful and accomplish the ultimate, joint goal of
improving health. This allows academic health centers the opportunity to
think about research in new ways.
First, they can think about research more broadly. How can it inform
the big societal questions? Second, they can approach research via
partnerships. Research is not something that can be effectively done solely
by academicians in isolation. If we can reach out to policymakers and
community members, then we will all have more success with research
and heighten its impact.
Finally, there are huge opportunities for new models where academia
comes together with government, philanthropy, and industry. When all
those stakeholders collaborate to generate evidence that informs health
policy, it creates a very powerful and exciting way to move research
forward in the future. By being part of these new collaborative models
of research, academic health centers can increase the impact of their
research and optimize evidence-informed health policy.
Claire Pomeroy, MD, MBA
President
Albert and Mary
Lasker Foundation
For me, one of the most important take-home messages from this
chapter is that research can be incredibly useful and powerful
in helping to shape policy; but, if misused, research can also be very
misleading. I always have had a strong belief that bad data is usually
worse than no data. Likewise, bad research is worse than no research.
Unfortunately with health policy, particularly because it is so politically
charged, some research is simply focused on trying to prove one point or
perspective, which is pretty easy to do if you don’t take other factors into
consideration when you are looking for a particular answer. This happens
in basic research all the time—if you don’t bring in the right covariates
and confounders, you often come up with an answer that may serve your
hypothesis but may in fact be wrong in other contexts and real-world
situations.
Fred Sanfilippo, MD, PhD
Professor of Pathology &
Laboratory,
Medicine and
Health Policy & Management
Emory University
Director,
Emory-Georgia
Tech Healthcare
Innovation Program