Journal of general internal medicine
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Failure of effective transitions of care following hospitalization can lead to excess days in the hospital, readmissions, and adverse events. Evidence identifies both patient and system factors that influence poor care transitions, yet health systems struggle to translate evidence into complex interventions that have a meaningful impact on care transitions. ⋯ Health systems need to address increasingly difficult challenges in care delivery. The use of evidence-based frameworks, such as the MRC framework, can guide systems to design complex interventions that respond to their local context and stakeholder needs.
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The effects of improvement (implementation and de-implementation) interventions are often modest. Although positive and negative deviance studies have been extensively used in improvement science and quality improvement efforts, conceptual and methodological innovations are needed to improve our ability to use information about variation in quality to design more effective interventions. ⋯ The delta study concept is a promising mixed methods innovation to efficiently and effectively identify improvement strategies and other factors that have actually produced change in real-world settings.
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Implementation science is focused on developing and evaluating methods to reduce gaps between research and practice. As healthcare organizations become increasingly accountable for equity, quality, and value, attention has been directed to identifying specific implementation strategies that can accelerate the adoption of evidence-based therapies into clinical practice. In this perspective, we offer three simple, practical strategies that can be used by frontline healthcare providers who are involved in on-the-ground implementation: people (stakeholder) engagement, process mapping, and problem solving. As a use case example, we describe the iterative application of these strategies to the implementation of a new home sleep apnea testing program for patients in the Veterans Health Administration (VA) healthcare system.
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Lean management has been successfully employed in healthcare to improve outcomes and efficiencies. Facilitation is increasingly being used to support evidence-based practice uptake in healthcare. However, while both Lean and Facilitation are used in healthcare quality improvement, limited research has explored their integration and the sustainability of their combined effects. ⋯ High-reach and relatively low effort, but persistent intervention led to significant improvement in guideline-concordant HCV testing rates which were sustained.
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Innovations and improvements in care delivery are often not spread across all settings that would benefit from their uptake. Scale-up and spread efforts are deliberate efforts to increase the impact of innovations successfully tested in pilot projects so as to benefit more people. The final stages of scale-up and spread initiatives must contend with reaching hard-to-engage sites. ⋯ We identified scant published evidence that describes strategies for reaching hard-to-engage sites. The sparse data we identified aligned with key informant accounts. Future work could focus on better documentation of the later stages of spread efforts, including specific tailoring of approaches and strategies used with hard-to-engage sites. Spread efforts should include a "flexible, tailored approach" for this highly variable group, especially as implementation science is looking to expand its impact in routine care settings.