Sharing new ideas and giving them wings: Introducing innovation reports

摘要

When I was a medical resident 37 years ago, most of the difficult decisions about treating our patients were based upon the opinions of faculty, who could quell a debate about treatment with a preemptive "In my experience...." Accurate, relevant information was difficult to find, and we were content to depend upon the experience of our attending faculty and upon textbooks for treating less difficult conditions. Now all of that has changed. Residents and medical students can conduct searches of various published materials on their smartphones during rounds as soon as a question arises, and they can have the answer before the patient presentation has finished.The easy and widespread availability of medical information has been one of the most profound changes in health care during my career. This information is not only available to health care providers. Patients and their families also can access current medical information. And there is so much of it! One of the greatest challenges in health care is to sort through the continuous flood of new information to find what is really important and applicable. How are we to identify what is valuable and new? How are we to evaluate the quality of the information, and how are we to remember it? For a journal such as Academic Medicine, which receives thousands of submissions each year, it is a constant struggle to select and present the information that will be most valuable to readers in their teaching, practice, research, or management of academic medicine's institutions.