Launched in the spring of 2008...[t]he Innovations Exchange is being designed to address a major challenge in health care delivery: the slow diffusion of innovative strategies and activities across health care providers. Every day, health care practitioners develop new, effective ways to provide better care, but that information does not move easily beyond institutional walls or across health care silos (e.g., from hospitals to nursing homes, or from private physician practices to community health clinics). As a result, great ideas are limited in their implementation—and providers are constantly reinventing the wheel because they are unaware that tested solutions already exist.
AHRQ's solution is to provide health care practitioners with:
A standardized way to document innovations,
A centrally located and searchable [OA] repository that all health care decision makers can use to quickly identify ideas and tools that meet their needs, and
A way to network with like-minded innovation adopters.
Users of the Health Care Innovations Exchange are expected to be a diverse group —physicians, nurses, administrators, allied health professionals, and others— with the common thread being their commitment to improving the delivery of health care.
...Why Participate in the Health Care Innovations Exchange?
Contribute to the Greater Good. The Innovations Exchange provides an avenue for you to bring about positive changes in patient care far beyond the walls of your own institution. By sharing your innovation, you will be helping to build a rich resource that will complement and enhance the usefulness of the traditional professional literature on health care services....
...You must be willing to make enough information freely available to enable a user of the Health Care Innovations Exchange to understand the elements of the innovation and make a decision about adopting it. This requirement does not exclude innovations that incorporate commercial products or other materials for which there may be a fee or licensing requirements. It is not necessary for all information about the innovation to be publicly available, but the Editorial Teams will need access to information with sufficient detail to produce a comprehensive description....
The Innovations Exchange will aim to include innovations that are or were funded by the Agency [but will not limit itself to AHRQ-funded research]....
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
