HSR&D National Conference — July 18-20, 2017

"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. Dr. Kerr is recognized internationally for developing innovative, clinically meaningful methods to assess and improve quality of care, evaluating the influence of care processes on quality, and understanding the challenges of providing care to patients with multiple chronic conditions.

Special awards presented in November 2016 also were acknowledged during the meeting, including:

• Daniel Deykin Outstanding Mentor Award to Steven Asch, MD, MPH, and John Piette, PhD, for their outstanding dedication and skill in mentoring the next generation of VA HSR&D researchers; and
• Health System Impact Award to Hardeep Singh, MD, MPH, for research in improving patient safety that has had a direct and important impact on clinical practice or clinical policy within the VA healthcare system.
• Best Research Paper Award recipients were Barbara Trautner, MD, PhD, FIDSA and Steven Zeliadt, PhD, MPH. This award honors an article or series of articles resulting from one or more HSR&D- or QUERI-funded investigations.

Other meeting highlights included a Keynote Address by Harlan Krumholz, MD, SM, Harold H. Hines, Jr. Professor of Medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine, and Director of the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE) at Yale New Haven Health. Dr. Krumholz spoke about NextGen Research: Opportunities and Imperatives Ahead. Guest speakers also included Richard Barbato – an Iraq war Veteran and Veteran Outreach Specialist at the Lowell Vet Center in Lowell, MA. In this role he serves Veterans and their families across the Northeast region of the state. Mr. Barbato's very inspirational speech received a standing ovation from meeting attendees.

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 community care, to name a few.

HSR&D gives special thanks to the National Meeting Planning Committee and this year's host Center–HSR&D's Center for Health Information and Communication (CHIC) in Indianapolis, IN for all of their hard work in developing and carrying out such a successful meeting!