Proactively tailoring implementation: the case of shared decision-making for lung cancer screening across the VA New England Healthcare Network.

BACKGROUND: Shared Decision-Making to discuss how the benefits and harms of lung cancer screening align with patient values is required by the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and recommended by multiple organizations. Barriers at organizational, clinician, clinical encounter, and patient levels prevent SDM from meeting quality standards in routine practice. We developed an implementation plan, using the socio-ecological model, for Shared Decision-Making for lung cancer screening for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) New England Healthcare System. Because understanding the local context is critical to implementation success, we sought to proactively tailor our original implementation plan, to address barriers to achieving guideline-concordant lung cancer screening. METHODS: We conducted a formative evaluation using an ethnographic approach to proactively identify barriers to Shared Decision-Making and tailor our implementation plan. Data consisted of qualitative interviews with leadership and clinicians from seven VA New England medical centers, regional meeting notes, and Shared Decision-Making scripts and documents used by providers. Tailoring was guided by the Framework for Reporting Adaptations and Modifications to Evidence-based Implementation Strategies (FRAME-IS). RESULTS: We tailored the original implementation plan to address barriers we identified at the organizational, clinician, clinical encounter, and patient levels. Overall, we removed two implementation strategies, added five strategies, and modified the content of two strategies. For example, at the clinician level, we learned that past personal and clinical experiences predisposed clinicians to focus on the benefits of lung cancer screening. To address this barrier, we modified the content of our original implementation strategy Make Training Dynamic to prompt providers to self-reflect about their screening beliefs and values, encouraging them to discuss both the benefits and potential harms of lung cancer screening. CONCLUSIONS: Formative evaluations can be used to proactively tailor implementation strategies to fit local contexts. We tailored our implementation plan to address unique barriers we identified, with the goal of improving implementation success. The FRAME-IS aided our team in thoughtfully addressing and modifying our original implementation plan. Others seeking to maximize the effectiveness of complex interventions may consider using a similar approach.

Generative Hanging Out: Developing Engaged Practices for Health-Related Research1.

"Hanging out" with one's interlocutors generates ethnographic ways to creatively involve people in health care research. This special issue focusses on people who are difficult to engage in conventional research because they are not verbally fluent, such as people with dementia or learning disabilities, or who speak a language that the researcher does not understand. In this introduction I discuss how "Hanging out" shifts the goal-orientation of research practices toward relationships and settings. Hierarchies may be shifted to provide attractive possibilities for interlocutors to participate by doing things together with the researcher. The research practice itself becomes the object of analysis.