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Formative Evaluation in Implementation Research: Guideline Development

NCT00683540 · Status: COMPLETED · Type: OBSERVATIONAL · Enrollment: 9

Last updated 2017-06-06

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

The Veterans Administration (VA) has embraced the use of implementation research as a critical way to improve care by facilitating the adoption of proven medical practices. Yet implementation science still remains rudimentary. Challenges exist in judging the success of an implementation project. Rather than relying solely on hard outcomes, an investigator must also assess how effectively an intervention is put into place at a site. This assessment comes via a formative evaluation (FE) plan. The FE plan can contain such diverse data elements as the number of fliers distributed about the intervention, how often an intervention advocate speaks to participants, the content derived from team meeting notes, and themes extracted from focus groups. The diversity of such data elements can appear foreign to investigators trained in traditional health services research. The FE plan can also lead to confusion about what to measure, when, and how to integrate the various measures into a unified whole. Complicating matters is the fact that FE is often qualitative--such as interviews, focus groups, and meeting notes which can make data difficult for investigators to interpret. Thus, there is a pressing need to provide clarity on how FE is to be used in implementation studies. This Short Term Project proposal offers a three-part approach toward specifying the best FE practices: first, a systematic review of the literature; second, qualitative interviews with VA implementation investigators; and third, a panel discussion of national experts, funded through a VA Implementation Collaborative Award. The panel discussion will outline FE guidelines based on the researchers expertise, the systematic review, and the qualitative interviews.

Conditions

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • VA Office of Research and Development

    lead FED

Principal Investigators

  • Susan L. Zickmund, PhD · VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System University Drive Division, Pittsburgh, PA

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2009-01-23
Primary Completion
2009-03-30
Completion
2009-03-31

Countries

  • United States

Study Locations

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Entities

Diseases

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT00683540 on ClinicalTrials.gov