Designing for Dissemination and Sustainability to Promote Equitable Impacts on Health

Designing for dissemination and sustainability (D4DS) refers to principles and methods for enhancing the fit between a health program, policy, or practice and the context in which it is intended to be adopted. In this article we first summarize the historical context of D4DS and justify the need to shift traditional health research and dissemination practices. We present a diverse literature according to a D4DS organizing schema and describe a variety of dissemination products, design processes and outcomes, and approaches to messaging, packaging, and distribution. D4DS design processes include stakeholder engagement, participatory codesign, and context and situation analysis, and leverage methods and frameworks from dissemination and implementation science, marketing and business, communications and visual arts, and systems science. Finally, we present eight recommendations to adopt a D4DS paradigm, reflecting shifts in ways of thinking, skills and approaches, and infrastructure and systems for training and evaluation. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Public Health, Volume 43 is April 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Dissemination and Implementation Science: A Primer and Applications in Nephrology

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Diffusion of Innovations

The main concepts of the diffusion of innovations represent a hybrid change research and practice paradigm that blends ideas that can now be found in life cycle, evolutionary, and teleological theories of social change. This chapter discusses why the paradigm developed in the ways that it did, including the shortcomings of this approach, especially for studying the role of organizations in change processes. The chapter also examines the rapid rise of dissemination and implementation science as conducted by health services and public health researchers and how those new literatures are related to diffusion. This paradigmatic evolution from descriptive and explanatory studies to intervention research utilizing diffusion concepts is a theme of this chapter, with emphases on organizational implementation of innovations, inter-organizational diffusion, external validity of innovations and how a recognition of the agency of adopters can reshape diffusion study.