¶ … nursing practice, the author demonstrated how outcomes research is becoming an efficient method of determining intervention effectiveness and success in the healthcare practice and setting. Resnick's article focused on describing the procedure of outcomes research and its implications to healthcare practice and applications to nursing research. Outcomes research is anchored on the discipline and systematic method of determining intervention success by identifying "improvement in health behavior practices" prior and after the given intervention to the patient (507).
A critical and very important aspect of outcomes research is that the process itself is not clinical or experimental in nature. Instead, to remain true to the practice of healthcare provision in a hospital or clinical setting, data is collected as the intervention happens. That is, the whole research process is integrated as the healthcare service or intervention is provided to the patient / subject / participant for the study. This for me is an interesting aspect of outcomes research, because it tries to reconcile the need of a researcher to collect "authentic" or valid data as the intervention happens. The author also acknowledges that confounding variables could affect the results of the research, but this has been recognized and factored in the statistical analysis of the collected data. From the research perspective, outcomes research is an "experimental" kind of research that could be more favorable than experimental or quasi-experimental research because it manages data collection and analysis in the "natural" setting -- as the intervention happens.
Further, because outcomes research has a qualitative component to it, it is able to generate and analyze data holistically. This also achieves triangulation from the end of the researcher and more importantly, for the end users -- the health practitioners and patients -- who will benefit the most from this kind of research. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods will also help the researcher achieve validity and reliability of collected data and findings, giving more merit to the results of the study.
The combined characteristics of outcomes research as having a "natural" systematic process of collecting data, mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods to generate and analyze data, and achievement of triangulation because of these methods and processes, make outcomes research a promising kind of research in the healthcare setting.
Reference:
Resnick, B. (2006). "Outcomes research: you do have the time!" Journal of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners (Vol. 18).
