Evidence generating medicine: redefining the research-practice relationship to complete the evidence cycle

Abstract

Accelerating clinical and translational science and improving healthcare effectiveness, quality, and efficiency are top priorities for the United States. Increasingly, the success of such initiatives relies on leveraging point-of-care activities, data, and resources to generate evidence through routine practice. At present, leveraging healthcare activities to advance knowledge is challenging. Underlying these challenges are a variety of persistent technological, regulatory, fiscal, and socio-organizational realities. Fundamentally, these result from the fact that the current healthcare system is designed around a paradigm that enables individual patient care and views the connection between research and practice as unidirectional (ie, research findings are applied to practice using evidence-based medicine) but does not support research-related activities during practice. We suggest that a fundamental paradigm shift is needed to redefine the relationship between research and practice as bidirectional rather than unidirectional and propose the concept of evidence generating medicine to provide a framework for realizing such a shift. We discuss how a transition toward evidence generating medicine would result in a range of much-needed system-level changes that would facilitate rather than frustrate the ongoing efforts of informaticians, health services researchers, and others working to accelerate research and improve healthcare.