It Takes an Average of 17 Years for Evidence to Change Practice—the Burgeoning Field of Implementation Science Seeks to Speed Things Up | Health Policy | JAMA | JAMA Network

C olorectal cancer screening with an at-home stool test is more convenient than with a colonoscopy, but an abnormal result on the former still requires a follow-up with the latter. However, studies have shown that in safety-net health care systems, only around half of patients with an abnormal at-home stool test result get a follow-up colonoscopy within a year, University of Washington gastroenterologist Rachel Issaka, MD, MAS, noted in an interview with JAMA. Issaka, not surprisingly, would like to raise that proportion. To accomplish her goal, she needed to find out why people were skipping their follow-up colonoscopy and what might help change their behavior and, possibly, save their life. So she turned to the relatively new field of implementation science. Put simply, “implementation science is really trying to close that gap between what we know and what we do,” Issaka explained. Or, as the National Cancer Institute’s David Chambers, DPhil, described his field, “implementation sci

C olorectal cancer screening with an at-home stool test is more convenient than with a colonoscopy, but an abnormal result on the former still requires a follow-up with the latter. However, studies have shown that in safety-net health care systems, only around half of patients with an abnormal at-home stool test result get a follow-up colonoscopy within a year, University of Washington gastroenterologist Rachel Issaka, MD, MAS, noted in an interview with JAMA. Issaka, not surprisingly, would like to raise that proportion. To accomplish her goal, she needed to find out why people were skipping