NUR 590 Week 7 Discussion EBP Project
NUR 590 Week 7 Discussion EBP Project
NUR 590 Week 7 Discussion EBP Project
DQ1 Identify the audience for your EBP proposal and discuss strategies for disseminating the proposal.
DQ2 How will you ensure that all appropriate audiences receive information about research and EBP initiatives?
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Effective Healthcare (EHC) Program funds individual researchers, research centers, and academic organizations to work with AHRQ to produce effectiveness and comparative effectiveness research for clinicians and consumers.1 Comparative effectiveness research (CER) compares the benefits, harms, and effectiveness of health interventions for the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and management of clinical conditions and the improvement of health care delivery. The purpose of CER is to assist patients and consumers, clinicians and other providers, and purchasers and payers to make informed decisions that will improve health care at both the individual and population levels.1
One EHC goal is to make CER accessible to these decisionmakers. The Institute of Medicine’s list of 100 priority topics for CER highlights the importance of translating and disseminating this research.2 The specific topic (“compare the effectiveness of dissemination and translation techniques to facilitate the use of CER by patients, clinicians, payers, and others”) was listed among the first quartile of topics recommended for initial focus. Many hope that better communication and dissemination of CER will result in more widespread use of such information.
Coupled with these mandates is the fact that the ad hoc Uncertainty Committee of the EHC Stakeholder Group is interested in promoting effective ways to communicate uncertainty about health and health care evidence to end-users. The committee would like to know what approaches to conveying uncertainty increase the likelihood that audiences receiving such information will understand it and be able to factor it into their decisionmaking.
This systematic review has three related components; all focus on promoting informed health and health care decisions among patients and providers. First, it addresses the comparative effectiveness of communicating the evidence in various contents and formats that increases the likelihood that it will be understood and used by the target audience. Second, it examines the comparative effectiveness of a variety of approaches for disseminating the evidence from those who develop it to its potential users. Third, it examines the comparative effectiveness of various ways of communicating uncertainty associated with health and health care evidence to different target audiences.
Terminology and Definitions
Transforming scientific evidence for its use in practice, commonly known as research translation, involves many processes and strategies. High-quality studies must be conducted and the body of evidence must then be synthesized and summarized, often in the form of systematic reviews. Research evidence presented in complex and technical jargon must be altered to simpler language that potential end-users will find easier to understand; it must then be disseminated to those audiences; and, finally, providers and others must incorporate it into existing health care processes and systems to improve health.
The terminology for each of these steps overlaps considerably. We list three key definitions to help readers understand the scope of our review, which focuses on the communication and dissemination of health and health care evidence and effective ways to present associated uncertainty (see Table 1). We deliberately avoid the term “translation” in our review because it is broadly and diversely defined. Implementation processes to improve health outcomes are beyond the scope of this review.