The role of policy in supporting clinician-led research on behavioral health integration

Abstract

In Best Care at Lower Cost, the Institute of Medicine laid out a vision for continuously learning health systems (Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, 2016). This issue of Families, Systems, & Health represents a substantial step toward this vision, with on-the-ground clinicians and administrators testing empirically informed hypotheses about practice transformation and population health management, and using those results to produce shared learning within and across systems. While the studies in this issue demonstrate that producing generalizable knowledge from clinician-led initiatives is feasible, they also demonstrate that the current system does not adequately support clinicians in doing so. To achieve the triple aim of better care, lower costs, and healthier people, health care will need innovation at all levels of payment and delivery (Berwick, Nolan, & Whittington, 2008), and to pursue the suggested fourth aim - "improving the work life of those who deliver care" - clinicians on the ground who lead innovations will need to be supported (Bodenheimer & Sinsky, 2014). This issue of Families, Systems, & Health demonstrates that health policy will need to adapt to better support and foster emerging clinician-innovators, who can be crucial partners in producing the knowledge necessary to improve our nation's health care systems, bringing us closer to the triple aim. (PsycINFO Database Record