Research and Operations: Joining Forces to Improve Care for Veterans

The Veterans Health Administration's move to adopt a joint operations-research perspective in promoting clinical innovation in the health care system has led to an increasing number of researchers, clinicians, and policy leaders collaborating on quality improvement activities. We describe 2 such programs, both aimed at improving care for older veterans, which were conducted by teams with both research and operations experience. We explore differences in perspectives, contributions, and roles of various team members, as well as discuss benefits and challenges of research-operations partnerships in quality improvement activities.