What Can Implementation Science Do for You? Key Success Stories from the Field
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J Gen Intern Med DOI: 10.1007/s11606-020-06174-6 © Society of General Internal Medicine (This is a U.S. government work and not under copyright protection in the U.S.; foreign copyright protection may apply) 2020
BACKGROUND
Implementation science evolved out of the need to reduce the persistent gap between research and practice by more effectively integrating evidence-based health interventions into routine care. As defined by NIH, implementation science is the “study of methods to promote the adoption and integration of evidence-based practices, interventions, and policies into routine health care and public health settings to improve the impact on population health.” Over the past 10 years, there has been a substantial increase in funding opportunities for implementation science in federal agencies including NIH, given the realization that it can take 17 years for research findings to be used in routine clinical practice, and even then, only one in five interventions make it to routine clinical care.1, 2 The field of implementation science is multidisciplinary—often involving teams of practitioners, researchers, and health care managers with backgrounds including medicine, psychology, nursing, public health, social work, social sciences, business, public policy, and engineering. The health interventions to be implemented are often complex as well, involving coordination across different care providers, logistics, technologies, and treatment settings. As with any multidisciplinary field, communicating scientific methods, models, and public health impacts can be challenging. To this end, we describe implementation science success stories involving health interventions, programs, guidelines and policies (referred to broadly as “interventions” in this paper), where the role of implementation science3 made a substantial, replicated, and sustained health impact across broad population groups. As our working definition, we assessed evidence of implementation success as achieving behavioral or clinical improvement in a population when interventions were implemented in multiple settings and scaled up and sustained after the original research on the intervention ended.
Our goal was to identify key examples (see Table 1) from different settings where there was a successful, deliberate, and active approach to ensure that evidence-based interventions were incorporated into routine practice settings. For some, these success stories occurred before the term “implementation science” was coined. Those who led these efforts may not have defined what they did as “implementation science” but rather as community-based outcomes research or quality improvement, but their processes and successes were replicated to inform the field of implementation science. By describing these implementation success stories, we also describe the common elements of these initiatives that led to their impact, including institutional or leadership buy-in, attention to enduser needs to ensure the interventions fit local settings, and use of implementatio
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