Informing Practitioners, Researchers & Policy Makers

Selecting and Implementing a Telemonitoring Program: Case Studies of Project ECHO

Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (Project ECHO) is a telementoring program for health professionals that uses adult learning techniques and interactive video technology to connect distal community providers with specialist and multidisciplinary teams in real-time collaborative sessions. Larson and Medved examine the adoption, implementation, and sustainability of ECHO programs at four academic medical centers in the journal Metropolitan Universities.

Project ECHO: Review and Research Agenda

This paper introduces Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes), describes its core components as an intervention, and briefly recount its ascent as a way to bring specialty health care to underserved rural populations. We conclude with suggestions for future evaluation and research to improve its performance in the field as it scales out. 

Strategies to Scale Up Social Programs: Pathways, Partnerships and Fidelity
This study funded by the Wallace Foundation and conducted by Larson, Dearing and Baker, assesses the conditions and circumstances that favor one scaling-up strategy over others. The primary focus is on collaboration and partnerships found in 45 social innovations that scaled up using different strategies.

An Agenda for Research on the Sustainability of Public Health Programs
In this American Journal of Public Health publication, Scheirer and Dearing provide guidance for research and evaluation of health program sustainability, including definitions and types of sustainability, specifications and measurements of dependent variables, definitions of independent variables or factors that influence sustainability, and suggestions for designs for research and data collection.

Design Research and the Diffusion of Innovations
This chapter in The Handbook of Design Research Methods in Education: Innovations in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Learning and Teaching by Larson and Dearing introduces the diffusion of innovation paradigm and explicates how, in the case of consequential innovations such as design research, diffusion operates. It poses questions that can facilitate a purposive diffusion strategy for accelerating the spread of design research as a new and effective methodology for use by educational researchers.

Designing for Diffusion of a Biomedical Intervention
In this American Journal of Preventive Medicine publication, Dearing, Larson and others apply what is known about diffusion to the general case of biomedical interventions and specifically pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). It defines designing for diffusion as the taking of strategic steps early in the process of creating and refining an evidence-based intervention to increase its chances of being noticed, positively perceived, accessed, and tried and then adopted, implemented, and sustained in practice.

Diffusing STEM Pedagogies: The Role of Opinion Leaders
Larson and Meyer use literature and exploratory data to contrast awareness and persuasion and suggest that opinion leaders in academic departments can play a critical role in the diffusion of STEM pedagogies in this article from Metropolitan Universities.

Disseminating Proven Approaches to Physical Activity Promotion
Approaches from diffusion of innovations and social marketing are used to propose efficient means to promote and enhance the dissemination of evidence-based physical activity programs in this article by Dearing, Maibach and Buller published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine .

How Centers Work: Building and Sustaining Academic Nonprofit Centers
In this publication from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, Larson and Barnes share findings about the development and sustainability of academic nonprofit centers. They describe how these centers work – how they were created, who leads them, how they are lead, and how they gain academic credibility and institutional stability.

Local Reinvention of the CDC HIV Prevention Community Planning Initiative
In the Journal of Community Health, Larson, Dearing and others conclude that to fully achieve the potential of HIV prevention community planning a distinction should be drawn so that information-seeking tasks are centrally coordinated and decision-making tasks are decentralized.

Next Steps in Designing for Diffusion of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis
Dearing, Norton and Larson suggest that pre-exposure prophylaxis, a biomedical intervention with potential to be highly effective if well implemented and used, appears well suited to sequential demonstration, first for experimental purposes with the objective of assessment of feasible delivery methods, and second for exemplary purposes with the objective of promoting its effective implementation in this article in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.