Dr Michael E. Chernew Details the Role of The American Journal of Managed Care®

Most academic journals are researchers talking to researchers, butThe American Journal of Managed Care^® (AJMC^®) is typically researchers talking to the community, says Michael E. Chernew, PhD, the Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Care Policy; director of the Healthcare Markets and Regulation Lab in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School; and co-editor-in-chief of AJMC^®.

Transcript

What role does AJMC®play in informing stakeholders?

We live in an era of fake news. The American Journal of Managed Care^® is dedicated to the true news, to holding up the bar of rigor, to look at a range of different topics related to managed care. We reject over two-thirds of the manuscripts that are submitted and we hold the ones that we accept to a high bar of academic rigor.

When folks want to know broadly what’s going on, they can turn to a lot of different sources. Many of those sources have vested interests in what they’re saying. Many of those sources haven’t actually studied rigorously what they’ve done. There’s often a notion that this is good enough information for our decision-making process. I don’t want to be too negative on that basic viewpoint, but the role of The American Journal of Managed Care^® is to identify when we really have strong scientific evidence on a range of topics, that’s typically generated by academics or certainly people working as researchers, and then the journal becomes a bridge.

The audience includes academics, but it includes a much wider group of people, so we bridge sort of the research generation community and the research consumption community. Most academic journals are researchers talking to researchers. We’re typically researchers talking to the community. We hold the same standards of academic rigor except we try and present that in a way that’s useful to nonacademics, and we try and publish on topics that are important to nonacademics.