The challenge of persisting gaps in the quality and outcomes of health care, public health and healthcare infrastructure planning, design and delivery, continues to attract interest from the research, policy and practice communities....
moreThe challenge of persisting gaps in the quality and outcomes of health care, public health and healthcare infrastructure planning, design and delivery, continues to attract interest from the research, policy and practice communities. Public health and population health programs can only deliver benefits if they are able to sustain activities over time. Implementation science is an emerging field of inquiry drawing from a diverse set of research traditions, methods and sources.
The talk will briefly review the origins and foundations of implementation science, discuss its strengths and weaknesses relative to closely-related bodies of activity in quality and safety improvement, and identify opportunities for increased collaboration and mutually beneficial synergy across both fields.
Implementation science and improvement science must enhance their attention to the significance levels of heterogeneity inherent in quality problems and their root causes, in the settings and contexts in which these problems occur, and in measuring the effects of strategies deployed to change clinical practices and improve patient outcomes. New research and practice strategies that build upon the strengths of implementation and improvement sciences represent the “next frontier” in efforts to improve quality, value and outcomes in health.
Such strategies offer considerable value if developed with a deep and balanced understanding of the magnitude and unique features of quality gaps, the need for multi-level, multi-component, context-sensitive approaches, and the need for continuous monitoring, evaluation and refinement of improvement approaches.
