Dr Dennis Scanlon on Submitting Papers to The American Journal of Accountable Care®

The American Journal of Accountable Care® (AJAC) welcomes different types of articles, including case studies, trends from the field, and insights, explained Dennis P. Scanlon, PhD, professor of health policy and administration at Pennsylvania State University and the publication's editor-in-chief.

Transcript

What types of content are you hoping to see submitted to AJAC?

At AJAC, we're trying to create a little bit of a niche to differentiate the journal from not only [The American Journal of Managed Care^®] AJMC^®—which is obviously a sister journal, if you will, within the organization—but also other journals in the field. I think that niche is really to be both a place for good academic work that can pass the muster of peer review, but also for innovative work—speaking of what we've spoken about recently—for those who are working hard on the ground to improve the health care system. So let me talk about each of those in turn.

I think on the academic side, what often differentiates one academic article from another, or whether something does or does not get published in the peer review process, is ultimately certainly the topic and whether the topic is interesting, but let's just assume that everything we get is going to be interesting and important. But it then gets down to the scientific validity of the findings, and that largely is linked to study design. Is it an experimental design? Is it a quasi-experimental design? Are there adequate control groups? What does the data look like? Are there limitations to the data? And what kind of methodology you throw at all that, right? So, oftentimes, we find studies that may get rejected from other journals because they're not perfect. But truth be told, from my perspective, there's never a perfect study. But there are often studies that are good, and they can be informative, that have limitations that won't be published elsewhere.

We're willing to consider publishing those studies because they can advance the field, they can make contributions, as long as the limitations are clearly acknowledged and, importantly, we think about how the field might move forward in a particular area, recognizing those limitations. So that's part of the niche that we're trying to accomplish is not that we're setting a lower bar or standards in terms of peer review, but really being willing to recognize the fact that research is very much incremental and science is incremental, and that there's a place for good, publishable work even with limitations.

I'd say on the other side, oftentimes people on the ground who are doing innovation on a day-to-day basis, people in integrated delivery systems, people in pharmacy benefit management organizations, or you name it, care management organizations, they're trying different things; they've got good ideas. They haven't set them up as studies and they certainly haven't collected data or designed this to be a research study. But that doesn't mean that what they're trying or what they're doing can't be informative to the field. So we've created a few new article types—case studies, trends from the field, insights, and things of that nature—where we're trying to allow those individuals to tell about what they're doing, but to tell it in a way that doesn't pretend it's a scientific study. I think that's also quite informative for the field as well. I'm hoping to see more of both of that type of content this year.