4.4: Communication and Transfer

Communicate and transfer research results into clinical, public health, and human service practice.

Other Information:

The implementation of research results in the health care Americans receive every day is the last step of productive research. The performance indicators at the end of this chapter highlight three ongoing efforts to improve prevention efforts among older adults, reduce infant mortality among minorities, and implement evidence-based practices in clinical care. Community Preventive Services: The Guide to Community Preventive Services serves as a filter for scientific literature on specific health problems that can be large, inconsistent, uneven in quality, and even inaccessible. This Community Guide summarizes what is known about the effectiveness, economic efficiency, and feasibility of interventions to promote community health and prevent disease. The Task Force on Community Preventive Services, convened by HHS, makes recommendations for the use of various interventions based on the evidence gathered in the rigorous, systematic scientific reviews of published studies conducted by the review teams of the Community Guide. The findings from the reviews are published in peer-reviewed journals and made available on this Internet Web site. HHS will continue to support the Community Guide and will disseminate its systematic review findings via its Web site. Clinical Preventive Services: The Guide to Clinical Preventive Services provides recommendations on screening, counseling, and preventive medication topics and includes clinical considerations for each topic. This new pocket guide provides general practitioners, internists, family practitioners, pediatricians, nurses, and nurse practitioners with an authoritative source for making decisions about preventive services. HHS will continue to support the Guide to Clinical Preventive Services and disseminate its systematic review findings via its Web site. HHS also supports a joint Clinical Decision Support program/project planning and coordination effort. This project will provide recommendations and an action plan designed to advance the development, widespread adoption, and value of clinical decision support in improving health and the quality and safety of health care delivery. AHRQ, CMS, IHS, and ONC are collaborators within HHS. The project also includes non-Federal partners, including the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology, Thomas Macromedia, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Partners HealthCare, American Medical Informatics Association, and Oregon Health & Science University. Dissemination of Findings: AHRQ plays an important role in translational research and dissemination of research findings. AHRQ conducts and supports research on value-based purchasing to help meet these information needs, including articles for the field on how to design, implement, and evaluate value-based purchasing programs. AHRQ’s studies and reports will expedite the cycle of research so that purchasers have quicker access to findings on value-based purchasing and will provide guidance on decisionmaking related to value-based purchasing. AHRQ’s Accelerating Change and Transformation in Organization and Networks program will promote innovation in health care delivery accelerating the development, implementation, dissemination, and uptake of demand-driven and evidence-based products, tools, strategies, and findings. AHRQ’s Innovations Clearinghouse, an online searchable database and repository of innovations in health service delivery, will capture effective methods of disseminating and sustaining improvements in the delivery of health care. In addition, the Innovations Clearinghouse will serve as a forum for learning about innovation and change. It will provide a national-level, publicly accessible mechanism for obtaining objective, detailed information on health care innovations and tools and will promote their dissemination, replication, adaptation, and use. Dissemination of Information: HHS also develops and disseminates information and guidelines based on applied research results. For example, NIH continues to develop and disseminate guidance related to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). SIDS, a syndrome of unknown cause, is defined as the sudden death of an infant younger than 1 year of age, which remains unexplained even after a thorough case investigation, autopsy, and review of the clinical history. SIDS is the leading cause of postneonatal mortality in the United States. Led by NIH in collaboration with various sponsors, the National Back to Sleep public health education campaign was launched in 1994 after the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended back sleeping as the safest sleep position for infants younger than 1 year of age. Since the launch of the campaign, the SIDS rate has dropped by 50 percent. However, despite the overall success of the campaign, African-American infants are placed to sleep on their stomachs more often than are White or Caucasian infants. The SIDS rate for African-American infants is two times greater than that of White or Caucasian infants. In collaboration with African-American organizations, NIH has developed comprehensive strategies to reduce SIDS in African-American communities. First, NIH launched a multiyear project to disseminate the American Academy of Pediatrics safe sleep guidelines in Mississippi. The project has multiple components, including training public health workers to convey SIDS risk reduction messages, developing partnerships with State and local stakeholders, and providing minigrants to community and faith-based organizations to assist with their outreach efforts. Second, a continuing education curriculum has been developed for nurses on safe sleep guidelines and effective ways to convey the risk reduction message. This curriculum will be implemented at regional and national conferences. Evidence-Based Practices: Several HHS operating divisions support grant programs that facilitate the utilization of evidence based approaches. SAMHSA’s Strategic Prevention Framework State Incentive Grants, e.g., require State grantees and their subrecipients to identify their substance use-related problems and to develop and implement evidence-based programs, policies, and practices that have been proven effective in addressing these issues. AoA funds a grant program and public/ private partnership to increase older people’s access to programs that have proven to be effective in reducing their risk of disease, disability, and injury. The partnership involves a variety of Federal agencies and private foundations that are coordinating their efforts to support the implementation of evidence based disease prevention programs at the State and community levels. In addition, the President’s Budget for FY 2008 requests $10 million in new funding under the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act to fund competitive grants. These grants will support the development of a statewide infrastructure to implement, monitor, and sustain highquality, evidence-based nurse home visitation programs. Funds will be used to support and enhance collaboration and coordination across multiple State and private agencies that already receive Federal or State funding to implement various home visitation models. This new funding will be used for investments in cross-agency collaboration, program development, quality-assurance systems, training, technical assistance, workforce recruitment and retention, evaluation, and other administrative mechanisms needed to successfully implement and sustain high-quality, evidence-based home visitation programs that have strong fidelity to proven effective models. These programs demonstrate how the results of research from HHS divisions, including NIH, CDC, and AHRQ, can be effectively translated into practice at the community level through service providers. HHS will continue its commitment to infuse evidence into practice through such discretionary programs. National Registry: SAMHSA supports the National Registry of Evidence based Programs and Practices, a Web-based system designed to disseminate timely and reliable information about interventions that prevent and/or treat mental and substance use disorders. Programs in the Registry have undergone a rigorous review. The Registry provides detailed descriptions of each intervention as well as outcome data.

Indicator(s):

Indicator:1

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