Clinical research and healthcare outcomes

The association of hospital research publications and clinical quality

“…8,9,[13][14][15][16] Properly valuing the societal impact of hospital-based health care research has important ramifications, especially for AMCs. As the scientific quantity and quality of research is not necessarily concordant with its societal benefit, various metrics have been proposed to specifically quantify the latter, [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] the most compelling of which would be an association with improved clinical outcomes. Through adjustment for multiple hospital characteristics, our study sought to isolate the association of hospital-attributed publications and clinical quality from the well-documented association of teaching intensity and quality.…”

“…While the societal impact of other hospital roles is more transparent and measurable, the value of research is often neither immediately apparent nor easily quantified 2 and may be regarded by some as a distraction from direct patient care. Although various measures of research impact in health care have been proposed, [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] arguably the most convincing would be an independent, hospital-level association of research and clinical quality. Because the extent of research and teaching activities at hospitals are often correlated (e.g., both are more common at academic medical centers), and because hospital characteristics, including teaching intensity, [17][18][19][20][21][22] have been associated with better outcomes, analyses to demonstrate the independent value of research must account for these known confounders.…”