From the Editors: Improving Care Through Enhancing Teams and Tools

At the time of this publication, our editorial team will have completed transitions that have been front and center at the start of the new year, which have changed our composition. Namely, our Co-Editor-in-Chief, Megan B. Cole Brahim, PhD, MPH, has now pivoted to serving as an Editor Emeritus, joining a valued and distinguished group. We have welcomed Kimberley H. Geissler, PhD, as the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, and we look forward to her leadership. With these changes, E. Lee Rosenthal, PhD, MS, MPH, has shifted from Co-Editor-in-Chief to Associate Editor-in-Chief. Durrell J. Fox, BS, CHW, remains our Deputy Editor, and Kevin H. Nguyen, PhD, continues as our Senior Associate Editor. Also, as we began the year, we held an editorial board meeting in January and welcomed many new board members, and thanked the members who have been serving on the Board for several years. We are encouraged by their participation and willingness to help us keep moving the Journal of Ambulatory Care Management forward as a space for original research, review articles, articles of practice, commentaries, and the occasional personal vignette and poem. We applaud the Board’s capacity to help us carry out our vision of “Promoting health equity in communities and systems of care,” as our journal’s tag line reads. In this, our second issue of 2026, Improving Care Through Enhancing Teams and Tools to Support Better Co-Management of Patients and Systems, we are pleased to share both articles of practice and original research articles. In our first article of practice, “Designing Complex Care Management Programs to Support Patients with Substance Use Disorder: An Essential and Overlooked Opportunity,” Kelly M. Schuering, MD, et al. look at coordinating complex care led by nurse and community health worker dyads along with other team members to meet the need of patients with substance use disorder who are receiving care and services in Medicaid accountable care organizations. Their experience demonstrates that with appropriate training and tools, Complex Care Management team members can collaborate to improve health outcomes. Our second manuscript is also an article of practice entitled “Optimizing Patient Care: Harnessing the Power of Physician-Nurse Practitioner Teams in Primary Care.” In this article, Mary Kooyer, DNP, RN, AGPCNP-BC, CHSE, et al. discuss a quality improvement project intended to better integrate the nurse practitioner into the medical care team. The authors explored comanagement of patients by nurse practitioners and physicians and found that the team-based care model was associated with a statistically significant increase in the number of annual wellness visits completed, suggesting this model holds promise for encouraging comanagement in general. In their original research article, “Diabetes, Dementia, and Disruptions in Health Care Use in 2020 for Low-Income Medicare Beneficiaries,” Avantika Saraf Shah, MPH, et al. look at Medicare and Medicaid claims data from 2018 to 2020 and demonstrate how populations at highest risk for poor outcomes fared across a comprehensive scope of services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Extended disruptions in routine care highlight opportunities to improve support for older adults with diabetes. Original research by Dawn Miller, DNP, RN, NEA-BC, OCN, EBP-C, et al. explores evidence-based practices (EBP) in their article: “EBP Strategies to Improve Nurses’ Professionalism.” They identify an association with the implementation of EBP online training and the development of nurse professionalism, knowledge of EBP, and professional values and identity, all of which together, they suggest, lead to improved quality of care. The researchers conclude that online EBP education can be utilized for ambulatory care nurses where there is a lack of clinical resources to support time outside of the clinic for education. The issue concludes with one final original research piece by Jena Wallander Gemkow, MPH, BSN, PN, et al. on “Improving Maternal Health Equity and Outcomes Through the Development of a Clinician-Informed Algorithm: A Feasibility Study.” The research team looks at the postpartum period and safety-net providers with a key objective of developing and testing an algorithm to support a population health tool to identify high-risk prenatal patients served by federally qualified health centers. They conclude sharing that future research should incorporate both inpatient, outpatient, and social determinants data to develop a more comprehensive understanding of patient maternal health risk in the postpartum period. In closing, we say thank you to Dr Megan Cole Brahim for the many contributions she has made to the journal in her role as an Editor-in-Chief. Among her lasting contributions was working to grow a strong contemporary board, contributing to our updated instructions to guide authors, and helping us better articulate the ongoing vision of the journal as a space for promoting equity and access to care. As she penned in our 2025 end of year letter from the editors, the journal offers “evidence and ways forward in the face of health care delivery challenges.” We look forward to continued collaboration with Megan and to continuing to examine those challenges faced in communities.