An overview of research and evaluation designs for dissemination and implementation

Abstract

Background: There is a wide variety of dissemination and implementation designs now being used to evaluate and improve health systems and outcomes. Methods: This paper is one product of a design workgroup formed in 2013 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in order to address dissemination and implementation research, and whose members represented diverse methodologic backgrounds, content focus areas, and health sectors. These experts integrated their collective knowledge on implementation designs with searches of published evaluations of implementation strategies. Results: This paper describes designs for the traditional translational pipeline, which builds on existing efficacy and effectiveness trials to examine how an evidence-based clinical/prevention intervention is adopted, scaled up, and sustained in community or service delivery systems. A range of randomized and non-randomized designs is used in this approach that focuses on producing generalizable knowledge about implementation and dissemination.

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original_citation: Brown, C. H., Curran, G., Palinkas, L. A., Aarons, G. A., Wells, K. B., Jones, L., Collins, L. M., Duan, N., Mittman, B. S., Wallace, A., Tabak, R. G., Ducharme, L., Chambers, D., Neta, G., Wiley, T., Landsverk, J., Cheung, K., & Cruden, G. (in press). An overview of research and evaluation designs for dissemination and implementation. Annual Review of Public Health. doi: 10.18131/G35W23 (pre-print).

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for support from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) (P30DA027828, C Hendricks Brown PI), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) (R01MH076158, Patricia Chamberlain, PI; R01MH072961, Gregory Aarons, PI). This paper grew out of a NIDA, NIMH, and NCI sponsored workgroup, as part of the 6th Annual NIH Meeting on Advancing the Science of Dissemination & Implementation Research: Focus on Study Designs. Earlier versions of this paper were presented as a webinar, and at the 7th Annual NIH Meeting on Advancing the Science of Dissemination & Implementation Research. NIH staff received no support from extramural grants for their involvement. The content of this paper is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding agencies.

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