Scale-up/Spread Activities Conducted by the AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange

The AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange aims to improve quality,
reduce disparities, and enhance efficiency by fostering the adoption of
innovations in health care delivery. The Innovations Exchange includes
an adopter-oriented Web site (www.innovations.ahrq.gov) with a central
repository of over 475 searchable innovations and 1,500 quality tools.
The site offers guidance to support innovation uptake, including
evidence ratings, practical adoption considerations, comments, and
innovator contact information.

The Innovations Exchange is very interested in promoting the
sustainability and spread of promising health care innovations and is
actively exploring avenues to help advance this area and support
innovators in addressing challenges to spread. Recent and upcoming
activities of the Innovations Exchange include:

1. Sponsoring a meeting for health care innovators who have contributed
innovations to the Innovations Exchange. The meeting, which took place
one day prior to the AHRQ Annual Conference this past week, engaged
innovators in discussing innovator roles, challenges, needs, and rewards
related to the spread of their innovations.

2. Developing brief articles and perspectives for the Innovations
Exchange Web site discussing the spread of innovations. Innovations
Exchange staff will contribute some of these pieces by interviewing
selected participants in the recent Conference to Advance the State of
the Science and Practice on Scale-up and Spread of Effective Health
Programs.

3. Convening a virtual roundtable with a group of participants from the
Conference to solicit discussion on how the Innovations Exchange can
help foster spread of health care innovations.

Please contact the Innovations Exchange (info@innovations.ahrq.gov) to
learn more about these activities. We encourage other stakeholders to
contribute to these and other activities designed to promote greater
interest and activity in scale-up and spread.