Why research?
It is for the intellectual challenge? Is it to make recommendation policymakers? Or is it to make the world a better place?
Margarita Alegria believes that health services researchers must change their focus “from a science of recommendation to a science of implementation.” Dr. Alegria’s address can be found in the upcoming HSR.
“The distance between the people who produce the information and the people who use the information—for example, end-users such as a clinician working in a safety net clinic or an immigrant worker who goes to his primary care doctor—is vast. We do not do much to minimize this distance—not even asking if the information we are producing will be valuable to the end-users. We basically produce the evidence and go on to the next research problem.”