The purpose of the proposed conference is to provide attendees with a structure for planning and implementing clinical practice guidelines that is effective and relevant to their particular organization. The conference will bridge the gap between the availability of evidence based guidelines and actually putting them into practice to improve patient outcomes. Implementation of pain management guidelines will be highlighted, however various other guidelines and their implementation will be discussed as well. The focus will be dissemination and implementation, as opposed to guideline content per se. These are critically important, yet challenging goals given the complexity of today's health care environment. The conference will attempt to provide support - in the form of tested implementation strategies - to those practitioners, quality managers and others who would like to implement changes which are designed to improve care and which are also based on scientific evidence. A group of multi-disciplinary experts serve on the conference advisory committee. Over the next several months the committee will: finalize the conference agenda and topics; facilitate preparation of and communication between various conference speakers; publicize the conference in the five-state area (Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and the Dakotas); and produce and disseminate the conference products. Allina will broadly disseminate the implementation framework which emerges from the conference as well as the entire conference proceedings to public and private sector organizations seekings more effective dissemination and implementation strategies. Short articles reflecting applications of concepts presented at the conference will also be published and circulated via the Allina Medical Journal.
