About this Research Topic
In 2006, the United States Congress passed 38 U.S. Code § 7308 thereby establishing the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Rural Health (ORH). The mission of VA ORH is to improve the health and well-being of rural veterans through research, innovation, and dissemination of best practices. ORH fulfills this mission with three pillars: 1) to promote federal and community care solutions for rural veterans, 2) to reduce rural healthcare workforce disparities, and 3) to enrich rural veteran health research and innovation. One of the ways ORH supports its mission is through the funding of enterprise-wide initiatives that seek to spread over 30 evidence-based interventions and best practices to rural veterans in need. Integrated into the enterprise-wide initiative program is an evaluation requirement guided by the planning, evaluation, and implementation framework, RE-AIM (Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance).
ORH’s enterprise-wide initiative program’s use of the RE-AIM framework to structure its evaluation requirements presents a unique opportunity to examine real-world implementation of over 30 innovations through a standard lens. In most implementation research, the investigative team decides on the intervention and setting, designs the research questions, determines the implementation strategies, and oversees the conduct and analysis of the methods to reach the results. In the context of ORH’s enterprise-wide initiative, evaluation teams, often with considerable health services and implementation science expertise, are paired with VA clinical operational and field-based leads to test the implementation of an innovation.
The goal of this special issue is to compare and contrast a variety of enterprise-wide initiative innovation evaluations and examine how using the RE-AIM framework may lead to broader lessons learned for large-scale implementation of rural health innovations. While the impetus for this special issue was the VA ORH program, we would be interested in other large-scale evaluation programs that focus on rural health, particularly those that have integrated implementation, behavior change, or process improvement theories, models, and frameworks. This compilation of papers will help the scientific community examine the challenges of implementation and evaluation in the rural healthcare context among a population that often encounters long-travel distances, access barriers, and health disparities.
Submissions should be Original Research Articles or Brief Research Reports focusing on the evaluation of the implementation of rural health innovation. Innovations are broadly defined and may include interventions in primary or specialty care, training of the rural workforce, telehealth, care coordination, and restructuring of health services delivery. We encourage submissions that use RE-AIM, or another theory, model, or framework, to guide the evaluation.
ORH’s enterprise-wide initiative program’s use of the RE-AIM framework to structure its evaluation requirements presents a unique opportunity to examine real-world implementation of over 30 innovations through a standard lens. In most implementation research, the investigative team decides on the intervention and setting, designs the research questions, determines the implementation strategies, and oversees the conduct and analysis of the methods to reach the results. In the context of ORH’s enterprise-wide initiative, evaluation teams, often with considerable health services and implementation science expertise, are paired with VA clinical operational and field-based leads to test the implementation of an innovation.
The goal of this special issue is to compare and contrast a variety of enterprise-wide initiative innovation evaluations and examine how using the RE-AIM framework may lead to broader lessons learned for large-scale implementation of rural health innovations. While the impetus for this special issue was the VA ORH program, we would be interested in other large-scale evaluation programs that focus on rural health, particularly those that have integrated implementation, behavior change, or process improvement theories, models, and frameworks. This compilation of papers will help the scientific community examine the challenges of implementation and evaluation in the rural healthcare context among a population that often encounters long-travel distances, access barriers, and health disparities.
Submissions should be Original Research Articles or Brief Research Reports focusing on the evaluation of the implementation of rural health innovation. Innovations are broadly defined and may include interventions in primary or specialty care, training of the rural workforce, telehealth, care coordination, and restructuring of health services delivery. We encourage submissions that use RE-AIM, or another theory, model, or framework, to guide the evaluation.
Keywords: Rural Health, Implementation Science, Evaluation, RE-AIM, Veterans
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
