The health services research (HSR) Consortium is a half-day meeting to bring educators, employers and students together to engage in dialogue about training for the field. The HSR Consortium is a response to recommendations from the Health Services Researcher of 2020: A Summit to Address the Field's Infrastructure Needs related to education and training which focused on the great need to bring educators, employers, and students in HSR together to engage in a productive dialogue about training priorities for the near-term. The HSR Consortium is envisioned as an ongoing, annual activity that will regularly review the state of the field in terms of training and infrastructure needs, and develop priorities and activities to improve training, as well as facilitate partnerships to strengthen the field of HSR.The HSR Consortium will be held at the conclusion of the AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting(ARM). Holding the meeting at the conclusion of the ARM provides an opportunity to bring together a broader group of individuals (from academia as well as the public and private sectors) than would otherwise be possible. The HSR Consortium meeting will feature an update on the state of the field followed by workgroup sessions focused around training and continuing education. Discussion in the workgroups will center on current issues facing the field and proposals to address these needs. The workgroups will also seek to identify potential for public private partnerships and ways to reach out to and engage smaller, geographically remote Universities and research organizations, which may not have large faculty focused on HSR. Approaches to help support researchers from vulnerable and less well represented populations will also be discussed. Dialogue between educators, employers, and students is greatly needed in HSR, both to ensure that training needs in the field are met and to encourage new collaborations to meet these needs. The HSR Consortium will aid the professional development of health services researchers by engaging HSR stakeholders around training the next generation of researchers, which hopefully lead to higher quality research and more useful and effective solutions for improving health care access, quality and outcomes .AHRQ's financial support of the HSR Consortium will enable these efforts to build the field of HSR, by facilitating dialogue around training needs, as well as building relationships that will ideally promote public-private partnerships to help meet training needs of the field.
HSR Consortium Narrative The HSR Consortium is a half-day meeting to help build the field by providing a forum for discussing health services research (HSR) training and continuing education. The need for the HSR Consortium was revealed as part of the Health Services Researcher of 2020: A Summit to Address the Field's Infrastructure Needs, which showed that the field has grown substantially over the last ten years, and now reflects a wide array of disciplinary perspectives. This diversity holds great promise for addressing key health services research questions in the future, but also creates some barriers in terms of exchange across disciplines, diffusion of new methods, and dissemination of research. In order to help HSR grow as a field, there is a need for greater dialogue among stakeholders with an interest in training. The proposed HSR Consortium will complement existing University-based training programs and continuing education activities undertaken by employers by facilitating dialogue between educators, employers, and students to propose activities and potential collaborations to improve HSR training. Improving communication between educators, employers and students is important to improving research quality, better translation of research into policy and practice, and the ultimate goal of helping to solve health care problems in society. 1
