ABSTRACT
Implementation science involves solving complex healthcare problems by motivating providers to use effective treatments in routine practice to improve patient outcomes. However, there is little research on which implementation strategies promote the uptake of effective practices, notably because of limited capacity to conduct multi-stakeholder, pragmatic implementation trials especially in academic medical centres. To ensure implementation science is relevant to the needs of multiple stakeholders (e.g., patients, providers, communities), academic medical centres and government-based funders need to encourage more implementation research in the real world. The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI) program applies a Learning Health System framework to deploy an Implementation Roadmap to support researchers and other stakeholders in training, planning, and execution of rigorous implementation studies to inform the best strategies for promoting effective practice uptake and improved outcomes. QUERI demystifies implementation science, especially by encouraging researchers to work with multiple stakeholders to address real-world problems and rigorously test implementation strategies that move the science forward while also informing successful effective practice uptake to improve outcomes for the people they serve.
