Upper Desc

Welcome to our web site and the initiative to improve health care and public health through enhanced scale-up and spread of effective health programs. This website was established in conjunction with the July 2010 Conference to Advance the State of the Science and Practice on Scale-up and Spread of Effective Health Programs, an event funded by the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, Commonwealth Fund, US Department of Veterans Affairs, Donaghue Foundation and John A. Hartford Foundation. The initiative seeks to envision – and trigger – a new era of rapid and broad scale up of effective practices in health care and public health, to achieve improvements in health and quality of life through more rapid diffusion and uptake of effective, innovative practices.

This site contains materials from the conference and additional resources useful in research, policy and practice activities to enhance scale-up and spread.

The website and blog are accompanied by an email discussion list. To join the list, please send an e-mail message to LISTSERV@WWW.LISTSERV.VA.GOV with the command SUBSCRIBE SCALE-UP-SPREAD-DISC-L as the body of the message. Leave the subject line of your message blank, and delete any email “signature” or other text inserted into the message. If you encounter any difficulty please contact Deborah Jenkins (Deborah.Jenkins@va.gov).


Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Six Interesting Ideas from Day Two

After a review of the conference's helpful commissioned papers on scale-up and spread in health care, public health and international health settings, the meeting turned to a visioning exercise where work groups tried to (a) imagine the attributes of a better system for spreading effective practice, and (b) identify "gaps" or areas for improvement. Though I didn't have the benefit of being in all groups at all times, here are some common themes and great ideas to emerge in the conversation:

1. We need to redesign incentives (e.g., payment, recognition, career advancement) for innovators and researchers that drive them to scale-up and deepen their skills in implementation and spread.

2. There is work to be done on raising awareness about the importance of change management and scale up that has to occur simultaneous to actual change management efforts (i.e., we need to create a ready substrate of the "interested, willing and capable").

3. There is an important distinction to be made between efforts to scale up a particular practice and multi-disciplinary efforts to improve health for large populations (i.e., differences in the motivations, interventions and mechanisms for these different types of change).

4. There is chronic underuse and under-testing of innovative practices, technologies and methods, particularly from other fields, and there is a need for "facilitated evolution" in order to accelerate learning and adoption -- creating networks of distributed innovation among all actors in a given system, region or population.

5. We need to create some kind of shared system for setting health care and public health priorities, based upon some calculus (acuity, volume, etc.).

6. We new forms of evaluation that yield learning during the scale-up process, as well as reliable studies of project performance at the conclusion of a given effort.

Over dinner, we also heard from Anne-Marie Audet, Rashad Massoud, Russ Glasgow and Chris Goeschel, offering perspective on ongoing efforts at to spread effective practices inside and outside of the US. Their stories and outcomes - which we'll include in the conference notes - were very compelling, demonstrating innovative models of spread and breakthroughs in mobilizing energy and activity at the front lines of care. Once again, we'll benefit from these stories and insights as we re-engage tomorrow.

Joe McCannon

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