march newsletter

The Blueprint: Paradigm Project Updates

The March Blueprint includes two new resources from the Paradigm Project, including an assessment by Dr. Jonathan Grant on strategies to increase the societal impact of health research, and a new installment of the Voices of a New Paradigm, featuring Kevin Frick and Lorraine Dean.

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Jonathan Grant from Kings College explores the existing academic reward structure that determines the career trajectories of so many academics—including tenure, peer-review publication, citations, and grant funding. The assessment illustrates how these incentives can lead researchers to produce studies as an end-goal, rather than pursuing impact by applying the work in real world settings. Dr. Grant goes on to explore nine systems-level, institutional, and individual-level innovations from other fields and their potential to make HSR more relevant to the “real world.”

The most recent installment of our Voices of a New Paradigm series, in which the Paradigm Project profiles leaders whose work is pointing HSR in new directions, features Kevin Frick, PhD, professor and vice dean for education of the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School speaking with Lorraine Dean, ScD, associate professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health about her work as a social epidemiologist and the potential of this emerging field to enrich HSR. You can read previous installments here.

The Paradigm Project continues to convene small expert meetings to explore the relevance of three timely “science innovation” topics for health services research. We will follow up each meeting with an issue brief that summarizes the discussion for the Paradigm community and larger field.

    • The first meeting on the use of complex, unstructured data and AI techniques in health services research convened in February.
    • The second meeting (April 12-13) will tackle the potential of “open science” practices to enhance the ability of HSR to improve health and health care for all. Among the topics for discussion are pre-prints and other alternatives to peer-reviewed publication, open access to scholarly publications, data sharing, and the role of funding and other incentives in facilitating or inhibiting open science.
    • The third meeting (April 19-20) will discuss the implications for HSR of a recently released Paradigm Project assessment on incentives and rewards for academic research.

Additional information can be found at AcademyHealth.org/ParadigmProject.