Serhal E, Arena A, Sockalingam S, Mohri L, Crawford A. (2018). Adapting the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research to create organizational readiness and implementation tools for Project ECHO. Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions. 38(2): 145-151. doi: 10.1097/ceh.0000000000000195
Project Extension for Community Health Outcomes (ECHO) uses a “hub and spoke” model to promote knowledge sharing between health care specialists and primary care providers. Citing the need for organizations to evaluate capacity to successfully implement and sustain ECHO prior to implementation, researchers developed 2 tools to evaluate readiness for implementation and improve quality of implementation activities. For the first tool, researchers developed a list of tasks related to the ECHO implementation and mapped them to the constructs of the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR). Based on these tasks and associated CFIR constructs, researchers developed questions for assessing readiness for implementation. Questions were piloted with end-users and the final set of 20 questions were mapped to 4 of Proctor’s implementation outcomes (i.e., appropriateness, acceptability, feasibility, cost). These questions are not intended to provide a final score, but can help organizations decide whether ECHO is the best intervention for meeting end-user needs and provide clarity around strengths and weakness for ECHO implementation. For the second tool, researchers listed tasks and procedures needed to implement ECHO, and mapped these tasks to the implementation process constructs of the CFIR (i.e., planning, engaging, executing, reflecting and evaluating). The final tool is a checklist of 27 tasks for implementing ECHO that can be used along with a project-specific implementation plan to promote successful implementation. Researchers plan to validate the tools in approximately 10 projects targeting different areas of health care and geographical locations using ECHO.