Research is crucial to ensuring that our healthcare and healthcare systems improve and develop to meet the needs of populations.  The Academy for Healthcare Improvement fosters an interprofessional community that advances quality improvement in health care through scholarly and educational activities.

Implementation Science is pleased to announce the publication of a new supplement  The Proceedings on Advancing the Methods for Healthcare Quality Improvement Research, covering a conference held by the Academy for Healthcare Improvement. The supplement includes presentations on study design, data registries, comparative effectiveness, and healthcare disparities.  This conference, held on May 7-8, 2012, was a forum for the current state and future needs of quality improvement research and its methodological and technical issues.   The overall goal was to bring about more effective application of quality improvement science in health care delivery and to learn new areas for application of quality improvement research, as described in the introductory article.

The Proceedings provide the reader with a series of concise papers that describe the key messages of each presentation and a commentary on the contribution of the presentation to the field of improvement and implementation science.  Topics covered include implementation, study design, statistical methods  and also three different perspectives for understanding and managing variation, important because “by controlling variation, it is easier to detect changes that are not explained by chance”.  Themes that emerged across presenters echo those voiced by attendees during roundtable discussions and are described in an article that reflects on the progress of the quality improvement movement over the past two decades and to assess the current status of this field.