Top medical journal to highlight healthcare innovations
The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has issued a call for papers on the subject of innovation in healthcare delivery; the papers will be subject to JAMA's normal editorial standards. It is hoped that through the publishing of healthcare delivery innovation papers that the journal can become an outlet for innovators.
The staid Journal of the American Medical Association is getting into the field of healthcare innovation. JAMA won’t be bankrolling startups or conducting medical research, but rather will spend 2016 highlighting innovations specifically in healthcare delivery.

In an article penned by patient safety guru Dr. Donald M. Berwick, JAMA Editor-in-Chief Dr. Howard Bauchner and Executive Deputy Editor Dr. Phil Fontanarosa, the journal this week issued a call for papers that will be subject to JAMA’s normal editorial standards. “We can make things known, subject to peer review,” Berwick, a member of the journal’s editorial board, told MedCity News.

The call for papers noted that the U.S. spent $130 billion on health and medical research in 2012, citing a JAMA article published in January. “The vast majority of this investment is in biomedical and technological research and underlying basic sciences. From the viewpoint of healthcare delivery, however, aggravating shortfalls persist in healthcare innovation,” the authors said.

“Heathcare delivery needs its ‘innovation incubators’ every bit as much as biotechnology does.” With this series, JAMA hopes to serve in that role.

“We want to create a much more agile outlet for innovators,” said Berwick, who ran Medicare for 17 months in 2010-11, and now is back at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a Cambridge, Mass.-based nonprofit he founded in 1991. “We’ll be seeing surprises happen, but they’ll be subject to [JAMA’s] high editorial standards,” he said.

The authors suggested a list of potential topics for the series on innovation, such as self-care by patients and family caregivers, teamwork, patient safety, design of care spaces, reduction of waste in healthcare, coordination of care and adaptation of delivery models from around the world, including developing countries.

“One area not central to this initiative is innovation in healthcare payment and finance, which has numerous publication outlets. JAMA will focus on new ways in which care is organized and delivered, not paid for,” they advised.

“I sense a tremendous amount of innovation going on around the world in terms of healthcare delivery,” Berwick said. He predicted that telemedicine and telehealth would be prominent in many of the submissions.

JAMA would like to see reports on actual outcomes, not just theories. The authors said that “highest editorial consideration” would go to original research.

Berwick added that JAMA’s editors would be looking for innovations that advance the “Triple Aim” of better health outcomes, improved population health and lower costs.

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