Scientific progress in cancer has brought unprecedented growth in knowledge, which has challenged health care providers and researchers to ensure that clinical practice matches the best available evidence. But adoption of evidence into clinical cancer practice remains slow and uneven across geographic regions and care settings, which has led to unwarranted variations and deficiencies in quality of care.1 In 2013, the Institute of Medicine declared cancer care as a system in crisis and called for explicit efforts to improve its quality
As the cancer community grapples with the challenge of how to improve cancer care, the change process in health care has been driven by two approaches that operate mostly in isolation from each other: (quality) improvement science and implementation science. Broadly, improvement science refers to systems-level work to improve the quality, safety, and value of health care, whereas implementation science refers to work to promote the systematic uptake of evidence-based interventions into practice and policy. The two fields arose from different philosophical underpinnings: Improvement science from industry, mostly automotive, takes a pragmatic approach to the reduction of poor performance in health
Hence Harnessing the Synergy Between Improvement Science and Implementation Science in Cancer is a must in these times.