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NEJM Catalyst: Practical Innovations in Health Care Delivery
Daily content, monthly surveys, and lively webcasts share insights on care redesign, patient engagement, leadership, and the new marketplace of health care
June 1, 2018
Since the launch of NEJM Catalyst, a new digital initiative from the publishers of the New England Journal of Medicine, it has become an important resource for sharing practical and engaging information about the delivery of health care among clinical leaders, clinicians, and health care executives – and anyone who aspires to be.
“NEJM Group saw a need and an opportunity to reach these three audiences in a sophisticated way with an open access platform,” says Edward Prewitt, Editorial Director of NEJM Catalyst, which was launched in late 2015. “We talk about the big issues in health care in a practical way – just as our tagline says, we offer ‘practical innovations in health care delivery.’”
Prewitt describes the offerings of NEJM Catalyst as a three-legged stool.
1. Original daily content includes expert articles, case studies of how an organization addressed a challenge or improved care delivery, interviews with leading innovators, and videos featuring the speakers from our quarterly events.
2. Quarterly livestreamed events address critical issues, such as Expanding the Bounds of Care Delivery: Integrating Mental, Social, and Physical Health, broadcast from Vanderbilt University Medical Center in January 2018, and Patient Behavior Change: Building Blocks for Success broadcast from Duke University in April. With outstanding speakers drawn from medicine and business, the presentations and panel discussions are lively, engaging, and on the cutting edge. Thousands of viewers from around the world tune in live and participate in online Q&A. Afterward, viewers can watch highlights or the entire four-hour event on the NEJM Catalyst website.
3. Monthly Insight Reports are drawn from ongoing surveys of more than 8,000 experts who qualify to be members of NEJM Catalyst’s Insight Council based on their roles in providing health care. These reports tackle the most pressing issues in health care, such as Immunization Against Burnout .
“NEJM Catalyst offers a much-needed online avenue for professional leadership learning and development,” says Dr. Stephen Swensen, MD, MMM, Medical Director of Professionalism and Peer Support at Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City. “It offers a service and a network that creates a practical approach to the common and complicated challenges faced by clinical leaders, health care executives, and physicians.”
Addressing a Need for Useful Information about Care Delivery
Within NEJM Group’s offerings, NEJM Catalyst represents a new focus on health care delivery. As a publisher, NEJM Group recognized that clinical leaders, health care executives, and front-line physicians share a common need for information about improving health care delivery – but typically, the information they read and learn from via journals and conferences is siloed based on their specific roles in the health care delivery ecosystem. NEJM Catalyst intentionally develops content that has relevance to physicians, to executives, and to those physician leaders who may be both. By creating dialogue around common problems, NEJM Catalyst aims to illuminate and inspire real solutions.
NEJM Catalyst is organized around four themes:
- Care Redesign focuses on team-based models, efficiencies, improved clinical flows, and the continuum of physical and mental health.
Patient Engagement draws from behavioral science and other fields to offer ways of involving patients in their own care and to encourage healthy behaviors.
New Marketplace addresses consolidation, changing business models, risk-based payment, regulation, and emerging topics in the evolving business of health care.
Leadership conveys approaches to teamwork, organizational behavior, governance, and organizational culture to engage business and clinical leaders in shared vision and action.
“NEJM Catalyst helps improve the care of patients with insightful viewpoints and innovative solutions that have been validated by leaders doing the real work of supporting those who care for patients,” says Swensen, who heads the Leadership theme.
Unlike academic research that can take a long time to reach readers and may bury actionable findings amidst academic rigor, NEJM Catalyst focuses on practical experiments and ideas that can be easily applied beyond the organizations where they originated, and delivers the information in an accessible way.
“We present the work of experts in a way that is actionable and readable,” adds Prewitt.
Useful for Medical Education and Hospital Libraries
For medical students and trainees, NEJM Catalyst offers insight into the realities of practice, as well as exciting new trends in innovation. For hospital librarians and their patrons, NEJM Catalyst offers a way to keep up with expert views and the evolution of health care.
“NEJM Catalyst topics are of deep interest to everyone involved in health care,” says Prewitt. “Integrated health, the payer-provider relationship, alternative payment models, the threat and opportunity of retail health, the future of safety-net hospitals and academic medical centers, analytics for health care delivery, and clinician burnout, to name a few.”
To view free collections of NEJM Catalyst content and a new e-book from NEJM Catalyst, click here .
