Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A hospital system uses the CFIR framework to systematically identify which organisational and contextual barriers are preventing adoption of an already-proven clinical protocol.
- Is an instance
A public health programme applies RE-AIM to evaluate not just whether an intervention works, but its Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation fidelity, and Maintenance in a real-world rollout.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A randomised controlled trial testing whether an intervention works under controlled conditions is efficacy research, not implementation science -- implementation science begins from the assumption that efficacy is already established and asks how to embed it in practice.
Editorial commentary
Implementation science emerged as a recognised, named field in the 2000s, particularly through the founding of the journal Implementation Science in 2006 and the US NIH’s Dissemination and Implementation Research framework. It develops and tests strategies for embedding evidence-based practices in real-world settings, attending explicitly to organisational context, behaviour change, implementation fidelity, scale-up, and long-term sustainability — the practical questions that arise once an intervention’s basic efficacy is no longer in doubt.
Foundational frameworks
Several frameworks anchor the field and are widely used to structure implementation studies: the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR), developed by Damschroder and colleagues (2009), which organises the contextual determinants of successful implementation into five domains; the RE-AIM framework (Glasgow et al., 1999), which evaluates public health impact along five dimensions — Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance; and Normalisation Process Theory, which focuses on how a new practice becomes routinely embedded (‘normalised’) in everyday work.
Relationship to translational research
Implementation science overlaps with the T3-T4 phases of the translational research T0-T4 model — both are concerned with moving proven interventions into real-world use — but implementation science is methodologically distinct: it treats the implementation process itself as the object of study, using its own designs, measures, and theoretical frameworks, rather than treating “translation to practice” as simply the final stage of a discovery pipeline.
References
- Damschroder LJ et al. ‘Fostering implementation of health services research findings into practice: a consolidated framework for advancing implementation science.’ Implementation Science, 2009. Glasgow RE et al. ‘Evaluating the public health impact of health promotion interventions: the RE-AIM framework.’ American Journal of Public Health, 1999.
Also known as
Implementation research · D&I research (dissemination and implementation)
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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