Abstract
Purpose Traditional efficacy research, or research that studies interventions in controlled settings, can be difficult to translate to real-world clinical settings. In this article, we introduce the field of health services research (HSR) as 1 possible tool to aid this translation. HSR is a field of research that examines and intervenes in the use, cost, quality, delivery, organization, and outcomes of clinical interventions and services in the real-world setting. The complexity of the world outside the clinic walls is accounted for in HSR methods and data sources. As such, HSR often requires collaboration of stakeholders, including patients, caregivers, clinicians, and policy makers. These stakeholders are often engaged throughout the research process, from selecting research questions to disseminating results. HSR brings together researchers from multiple disciplines, including sociology, health economics, epidemiology, and implementation science, among others. The outcomes of HSR can inform policy changes both locally and nationally. To clarify the scope and impact of HSR, we present examples of HSR-based research on communication between patients with communication disorders and health care providers. Conclusions HSR is a critical tool for clinicians and researchers in the discipline of communication sciences and disorders who are committed to improving the lives and health of persons with communication disorders.
Highlights
The need for advancing HSR in CSD is even more critical and timely given the current state of our everchanging health care system. It is our responsibility as CSD clinicians and researchers to advocate for our patients and work toward building a better health care system that can best address their needs
This requires us to venture beyond traditional research designs and methods, partnerships, and settings to engage with researchers from other disciplines, our patients, and other key stakeholders in the quest for improved “use, costs, quality, accessibility, delivery, organization, financing, and outcomes of health care services” (Institute of Medicine, 1995)
Patients living with CD deserve accessible, equitable, high-quality, and affordable health care services
Summary
HSR seeks to understand the complexities of health care delivery and outcomes. It provided the first national estimates of the number of adults living with speech, language, and voice disorders (10% of the population; Morris, Meier, Griffin, Branda, & Phelan, 2015) It revealed that 80% of those reporting one of these disorders reported that they have never received a diagnosis for their disorder, which demonstrates a potentially large gap in patients’ abilities to access health care services. EHR data could be used to retrospectively understand how health care providers document the communication needs of patients who underwent total laryngectomies (Morris & Kho, 2014) or prospectively evaluate the effects of an intervention to increase providers’ use of standard language to describe patients’ CD. The authors found that physicians rarely used evidence-based communication strategies, such as using visual aids, desired
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