» Table of Contents

HSR&D/QUERI National Meeting

“Accelerating Innovation and Implementation in Health System Science” was the theme of the 2017 VA Health Services Research and Development Service (HSR&D) and Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI) National Meeting that was held July 18-20 in Arlington, VA. This year’s theme emphasized three key goals of an optimal learning healthcare system:

• Speeding innovative solutions for the highest priority issues for Veterans and the VA healthcare system;
• Accelerating system-wide adoption and spread of proven best practices; and
• Improving VA’s ability to utilize healthcare data to enhance coordinated care, identify best practices, and effectively engage patients.

Meeting participants included more than 350 researchers, VA partners, and clinical leaders. Competitively selected from more than 800 submitted abstracts, the meeting featured: 7 plenary papers, 74 additional papers presented as part of themed sessions, 5 workshops, 10 partnered panel sessions, and 100 posters on healthcare issues of vital importance to Veterans and the VA healthcare system. Topics included but not limited to pain management, suicide prevention, access to care (particularly for rural Veterans), PTSD, telemedicine, intimate partner violence, opioid prescribing, complementary and integrative healthcare, obesity, medical foster homes, patient safety, and how Veterans may be affected by the Veterans Choice Program. 

National Meeting Highlights

VA’s Chief Research and Development Officer, Rachel Ramoni, DMD, ScD, presented her remarks as part of the plenary session on day two of the meeting. Dr. Ramoni spoke about what she considers her priority areas – impact, efficiency, and cross-agency coordination, and left plenty of time for Q&A with the audience to find out how she could best facilitate research, and what HSR&D investigators view as their biggest barriers to conducting research. In addition, Miguel LaPuz, MD, MBA, Acting Principal Deputy Under Secretary for Health,  presented the Under Secretary’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Health Services Research to Eve Kerr, MD, MPH, Director of HSR&D’s Center for Clinical Management Research (CCMR) in Ann Arbor, MI, for her remarkable dedication to improving the health and care of Veterans.

For the first time, the National Meeting was offered to those who could not attend via live streaming, which included plenary sessions, as well as paper sessions and other research presentations. You may access the HSR&D/QUERI National Meeting Live Stream Archive at any time. Also new this year are Meeting Podcasts that feature nearly 20 HSR&D investigators talking on topics that include the Veterans Choice Program, chronic pain care, suicide prevention, homelessness, and VA community care, to name a few.

For more information about the HSR&D/QUERI National Meeting, or to view any number of meeting presentations visit the 2017 National Meeting page.