July 2019 Special Focus Issue on Innovation in Group-Delivered Services
Guest Editors:
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Paula Gardiner, MD, MPH |
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Maria T. Chao, DrPH, MPA |
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Marena Burnett Senior Director of Engagement and Innovation Centering Healthcare Institute |
| Special Issue Advisory Team: | |
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Jeffrey Geller, MD, MPH Darshan Mehta, MD, MPH |
Stephanie Taylor, PhD Thomas Trompeter |
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An emerging mosaic of clinical evidence supports vastly expanded use of group services to deliver optimal care - especially in integrative health and medicine models. The picture is compelling. Many well-researched integrative programs are group delivered – those from the Benson-Henry Institute, Centering Healthcare Institute, Ornish Reversal Program, and mind body interventions such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, yoga, and tai chi.
We see access to services among economically-challenged, multiethnic populations who cannot otherwise access integrative care. We see emerging evidence of cost-savings and of increased satisfaction among practitioners who have a clinical component of group work. Strategies for behavioral change show a facilitative leadership style with opportunities for interactivity and experiential learning are more effective methods of learning, of engagement and of empowerment. For the values of integrative health, we see tremendous alignment.
In July 2019, JACM will publish a Special Focus Issue on Innovation in Group-Delivered Services. We are pleased to engage this work in partnership with Integrative Medicine for the Underserved (IM4US) and Centering Healthcare Institute. We are encouraging submission of original research, commentary, and/or reviews. We are interested in effectiveness data from innovative models. We seek reports on cost outcomes, payments strategies, and sustainable programs. We are interested in group models focused on single modalities such as group-delivered acupuncture and in multimodality approaches. We are interested in methodologies tailored to group-based research and applied clinical education strategies on group clinical methods. We seek commentaries that explore health policy and reimbursement changes based on clinical research. In alignment with JACM's ongoing editorial focus, we seek explorations of translational issues: implementation research, comparative cost analyses, and improvement research.
We invite your submissions! We are interested in group-delivered services with intended clinical endpoints. We anticipate that group services will be increasingly offered as medicine moves to become a system for enabling people toward health. Our goal is to create a volume that will serve as guidance for increasing appropriate uptake of innovative group services in health-oriented payment and delivery of the future.
Manuscript submission due date: February 28, 2019
When submitting your paper, please select the “Innovation in Group-Delivered Services 2019 Special Issue” manuscript category to ensure it is considered for this special issue.
Original manuscripts should be no longer than 3,000 words, and Systematic Reviews should be no longer than 4,500 words. Title, abstract, acknowledgments, disclosures, references, and figure/table legends do not count toward the word limit.
Additional feature: As an additional feature in this JACM Special Focus Issue, we urge your submission of a 500-word commentary to reflect on next steps for group-delivered services: controversies; unusual experiences (not case reports); models of care; educational models; etc. We will select from those submitted a set that will be published together to capture the challenges and opportunities for this moment for the field.
If you have questions in this area, or ideas for other submissions that might strengthen the value of this special issue, please feel free to query us via JACM Editor-in-Chief John Weeks.