Beyond Effectiveness: Implementation Science 101 for Clinicians and Clinical Researchers
Edmond Ramly, Heidi W. Brown
Abstract
One of our greatest challenges to achieving improved health for all is closing the gap between scientific discovery and real-world practice: the gap between what we know works to improve health and what is actually implemented in clinical and community settings. The field of implementation science has emerged over the past 3 decades, applying scientific rigor from diverse disciplines to close this gap. The goal of implementation science is to increase our understanding of how to get evidence-based interventions into practice to maximize the likelihood that interventions are equitably adopted and sustained, shorten time to widespread use, and ultimately, maximize impact on health. This work also sometimes calls for de-implementing ineffective interventions or adapting implementation strategies to different contexts to avoid perpetuating or exacerbating health disparities.