On September 24, more than 110 members of the Dartmouth and implementation science communities gathered for a meeting at Dartmouth College to discuss implementation science—an emerging discipline in biomedical research that focuses on effectively moving scientific evidence into routine practice.
The daylong event, co-sponsored by Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine and the Global Implementation Society, gave attendees an opportunity to learn about implementation science and have a dialogue around the burgeoning field across a number of different sectors including healthcare, education, climate and energy transitions, behavioral interventions, and criminal justice.
Jeremiah Brown, PhD, MS, founding director of the Dartmouth Center for Implementation Science and professor of epidemiology at Geisel, kicked off the symposium, saying, “This is an historic moment, not just for implementation science but also for Dartmouth.”
PHOTO GALLERY (Photos by Rob Strong)
Before introducing welcome speakers Santiago Schnell, PhD, and Steven Leach, MD, Brown referenced the Dartmouth motto, “Vox clamantis in deserto” (meaning “a voice crying out in the wilderness”), adding, “Today, you are that collective voice for implementation science.”
Schnell, who serves as provost and professor of mathematics at Dartmouth, shared his excitement about the growth of implementation science. “Over the last decade, it has matured from being a prominent concept into a rigorous multidisciplinary field that includes epidemiology, behavioral sciences, systems engineering, data science, and ethics,” he said. “Yet, its central mandate remains incredibly and disarmingly simple—close the gap of ‘know’ to ‘do’ with speed, fidelity, and equity.”
Steven Leach, Geisel’s interim dean, encouraged everyone, especially student attendees to, “engage deeply with the ideas, the people, and the possibilities around you today. This is a space not just for implementation but for collaboration, for learning, and for advancing a shared vision, one where evidence-based care and implementation across multiple disciplines is not the exception but the norm.”
In her keynote address, Maria Fernandez, PhD, the Lorne Bain Chair in Public Health and Medicine and vice president of population health and implementation science at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health, gave a comprehensive overview of implementation science, including its concepts, benefits, and examples of its applications.
Fernandez acknowledged that the field offers both great challenges and great opportunities. “About 20 years ago, there was a paper that came out that estimated that it takes 17 years to turn 14 percent of original research to the benefit of patient care. You might think, ‘Well, that was a long time ago, so we’ve probably improved.’
“I think we have a little bit, largely from many of the initiatives in implementation science and implementation research,” she said. “But all we have to do is look at what happened during COVID when outcomes were much more related to our capacity to implement the innovations, including testing and vaccination, than they were about the products themselves.
“Clearly, there are many tools in implementation science that can be applied to the real world to help accelerate the use of innovations that make a difference,” said Fernandez. “Systematic approaches for putting all these tools together, I think, are really important. There’s a lot to be learned. And by leveraging other disciplines, there’s a lot of potential for innovation but also to advance the field very quickly.”
After Fernandez’s address, Brown provided an update on several exciting developments taking place at Dartmouth in implementation science—including a $12 million grant from the NIH to establish a center of excellence and multidisciplinary research program in the discipline, and the launching of its Master of Science (MS) in Implementation Science (fully online) graduate degree program.
In a series of panel discussions that followed, featured guest speakers and audience members talked about the application of implementation science across many areas.
The event concluded with a poster session (featuring more than 25 projects) and networking reception.
