Does the world need a scientific society for research on how to improve healthcare?

In the previous decades, scientific research on "how to improve healthcare" has been increasingly recognized as a legitimate field of research [1,2]. It has evolved under various names, including implementation science, knowledge translation (KT) research, improvement science, evidence-based practice, research utilization, delivery science, and patient safety science [3]. Also across a range of other academic fields, such as clinical epidemiology, medical education, and clinical sciences, researchers have started to pay attention to questions concerning how to improve healthcare. Dedicated scientific journals have emerged, such as Implementation Science, BMJ Quality and Safety, and the International Journal for Quality in Health Care. These developments have occurred across the world, although not at equal speed and shape across countries, facilitated by major health-research funders, such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, ZonMW in The Netherlands, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and (more recently) the National Institutes of Health in the United States [4]. Policy makers at the highest level are calling for more and better research in the area [5-7].From our perspective, as academics engaged with improving healthcare, these developments are very positive. Whilst we continue to have debates on the nomenclature, epistemology, concepts, methods, and ways forward for the field, we share the same ambition. Our core idea is that we need to use a scientific process to understand how knowledge is translated into healthcare practice, management, and policy to achieve the best possible (health) outcomes at the optimum value. This implies that we want to learn about the needs of research users and address those needs. Implementation science has been defined as "the study of the methods and results of the implementation of proven treatments, practices, organizational and management interventions into routine practice" [8]. The variety of other name