David Atkins, MD, MPH, recently joined VA's Office of Research and Development as the new Associate Director of the Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI).
David Atkins, MD, MPH, recently joined VA's Office of Research and Development as the new Associate Director of the Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI). Dr Atkins brings outstanding expertise in the field of implementation science to the QUERI program having spent more than a decade as Chief Medical Officer at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). His duties at AHRQ included supervising 13 Evidence-based Practice Centers (EPCs), where he had ample hands-on experience in negotiating at the intersection of research, quality improvement, evidence-based practice, and public policy.
Before serving as Chief Medical Officer for the EPCs, Dr Atkins was the Coordinator for Clinical Preventive Services at AHRQ's Center for Practice Technology Assessment. In that role, he directed an array of programs and research activities relating to clinical preventive services and health promotion, such as directing the work of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. Board certified in Internal Medicine, Dr. Atkins also has a Masters of Public Health in Epidemiology. Prior to joining AHRQ, he split his time between conducting epidemiologic research on cardiovascular disease prevention and providing primary care in the ambulatory setting.
In addition to several faculty appointments, Dr. Atkins has served on national committees that include the Armed Forces Epidemiology Board, American College of Preventive Medicine's Practice Guidelines Committee, and the American Cancer Society's Detection and Treatment Advisory Group. Dr. Atkins is a member of the editorial board for the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and he has authored nearly 40 articles and/or book chapters and given more than 50 presentations on topics such as improving cancer screening in the primary care setting, assessing outcomes of health promotion and disease prevention, and the science of practice guidelines.
Following is a brief Q&A with the new Director of QUERI.
While at AHRQ, were you aware of the QUERI program? If so, what were your impressions about the work being done?
The focus at AHRQ has long been on closing the quality gap—the gap between what we know about effective healthcare and what gets delivered in the typical healthcare setting. However, a challenge for any research agency is identifying which research is likely to address critical needs and actually influence the behavior of clinicians, health systems, and policy makers. QUERI provides a compelling model for the potential provided when you embed the research within a health system that faces a continual array of challenging clinical and policy decisions—decisions that should be informed by science. I was very attuned to the work coming out of QUERI centers, which look at variations in practice, new models for delivering care, ways to improve the uptake of certain interventions, and improvements in ways to measure and reward quality.
Do you feel that implementation science has become an accepted (perhaps necessary) part of health services research?
I think we have come a long way toward making this range of implementation research a critical element of health services research - it demonstrates that health services research is not just about describing problems in healthcare, but also about solving them.
QUERI has accomplished many things during its first decade. What would you like to see it accomplish during the next decade?
I would like to strengthen the links between QUERI and the VA-wide efforts on quality, safety, and performance measurement. I think the work done within QUERI can help provide a more systematic roadmap for targeting where to focus our efforts on quality improvement, how to understand the factors that contribute to the quality gaps that exist, and how to design interventions that are matched to the underlying problems and that are feasible for widespread implementation. It is tempting when we look at the size of the quality gaps documented in reports such as the Institute of Medicine's "Crossing the Quality Chasm" report, and AHRQ's "National Healthcare Quality Report" to assume there must be some magic bullet that will have dramatic effects on quality of care. However, implementation research is about change and we know that change is hard—whether we are talking about changing how patients behave, how doctors practice, or how systems function. The fact that it is so hard is what makes this research interesting, important and critical.
HSR&D welcomes Dr. Atkins and looks forward to his leadership, as QUERI continues to implement evidence-based innovations that help to improve the health and healthcare of veterans. Many accolades and thanks go forward to Dr. Joe Francis, VA's Deputy Chief Research and Development Officer, for his vision, and leadership as Associate Director of QUERI since 2004.
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