Table 2 Implementation strategies
Strategy | Description |
|---|---|
Audit and feedback | A summary of health workers’ performance over a specified period of time, given to them in written, electronic, or verbal format. May include recommendations for clinical action. |
Local opinion leaders/champions | The identification and use of identifiable local opinion leader to promote or champion good clinical practice. |
Patient-mediated interventions | The use of patients to change professional practice; could include the provision of patient-reported outcomes to practitioners. |
Public release of performance data | Informing the public about healthcare providers by the release of performance data in written or electronic form. |
Reminders | Manualized or computerized interventions that prompt health care workers to perform and action during a consultation with a patient, i.e., computer decision support systems. |
Educational games | The use of games as an education strategy to improve standards of care. |
Educational materials | Distribution of individuals, groups, or educational materials to support clinical care, i.e., any intervention in which knowledge is distributed. |
Education meetings | Courses, workshops, conferences of other educational meetings. |
Educational outreach visits or academic detailing | Personal visits by a trained person to health care workers in their own settings, to provide information with the aim of changing practice. |
Routine patient-reported outcome measures | Routine administration and reporting of patient-reported outcome measures to providers and/or patients. |
Managerial supervision | Routine supervision visits by health staff. |
Decision support tools such as guidelines | Evidence-based guidance on appropriate health care for specific clinical circumstances, e.g., symptom triage protocols. |
Local consensus processes | Formal or informal local consensus processes, for example agreeing to a clinical protocol to manage a patient group, or for adapting a guideline. |
Continuous quality improvement | An iterative process to review and improve care that includes involvement of healthcare teams, analysis of a process or system, a structured process improvement method or problem-solving approach and use of data to analyze changes, i.e., Plan, Do, Study, Act Cycles |
Inter-professional education | Continuing education for healthcare professionals that involves more than one profession in joint, interactive learning. |
Tailored interventions | Interventions to change practice that are selected based on an assessment of systematic assessment of barriers to change. |