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Proposed standards for quality improvement research and publication: one step forward and two steps back

¹ The Johns Hopkins University, Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, Surgery, and Health Policy and Management, Baltimore, MD, USA
² University of California San Francisco, Department of Medicine; UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco, CA, USA

Correspondence to:
Associate Professor P Pronovost
The Johns Hopkins University, Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, Surgery, and Health Policy and Management, 1909 Thames Street, 2nd Floor, Baltimore, MD 21231, USA; ppronovo@jhmi.edu

Keywords: quality improvement; evidence; publication; guidelines

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The recent article by Davidoff and Batalden and the accompanying commentaries left us with mixed emotions.^1–4 On the one hand we applaud the authors’ efforts to improve the evidentiary base of quality improvement (QI) through publication guidelines. These guidelines will bring structure and rigor to the field of QI, which is a necessity.

However, the author’s plea and support for more rigor was placed in the midst of an argument to "dumb down" the scientific expectation of journals and readers regarding QI research. While we are all frustrated by the slow pace of improvement in quality of care and appreciate the authors’ and commentators’ arguments to relax traditional evidence based medicine standards for QI research and publication, we fear this approach would be detrimental to the field, waste essential and scarce resources, and lead providers and organizations down too many blind alleys.

The authors frame . . . [Full text of this article]

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