The Society for Implementation Research Collaboration (SIRC) held their 4th biennial conference at the University of Washington September 7-9. Over 30 Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences faculty and staff participated in planning the conference and/or presenting their research. Several department faculty and staff serve as officers for SIRC, including Kate Comtois, PhD, Maria Monroe-DeVita, PhD, Aaron Lyon, PhD, Andria Pierson, Doyanne Darnell, PhD, and Shannon Dorsey, PhD (adjunct). Other department faculty and staff helped organize the meeting, led workshops, and served as presenters or co-authors. Many more department faculty and staff attended the conference.
Implementation science “is the study of methods to promote the adoption and integration of evidence-based practices, interventions and policies into routine health care and public health settings,” according to the National Institutes of Health. It is a relatively new field of research that seeks to understand and eliminate barriers that prevent evidence-based healthcare (and other) innovations from diffusing into practice quickly and easily. According to a 2001 report published by the Institute of Medicine, the lag between when a healthcare innovation is proven effective and when an average healthcare setting routinely delivers that healthcare improvement is 17 years. What’s more, only 14% of research findings become part of routine care, even after 17 years. This has been called a “quality chasm” and implementation science seeks to identify factors that reduce or eliminate this impediment to better care.
Many Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences faculty are national leaders in implementation research with work spanning a wide range of target populations (e.g. older adults, school-age children, veterans, people living in Eastern Congo) and conditions (e.g. autism, addictions, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder). The common thread is research to understanding ways to reduce or eliminate the quality chasm so innovative and effective treatments reach the people who need them faster.
