Our mission is to improve care for older adults by testing and disseminating proven interventions.
To accomplish our mission, we leverage faculty expertise, "big data" infrastructure, and unparalleled national relationships with healthcare providers. We partner with innovators who have developed interventions that show promise, but need research partners to provide the research skills necessary to rigorously test the interventions and translate them into practice.
Our vision is to:
Q&I links post-acute and long-term care providers with academic researchers. While we conduct research in all care settings, we aim to be a national leader in pragmatic research in these specific settings, which:
We seek promising interventions that need to be proven effective. Moving along a continuum similar to the NIH’s Stage Model for Behavioral Intervention Development, we obtain grant funding for effectiveness testing.
“Pragmatic trials” – which involve providers implementing interventions, often as quality improvement interventions – are our gold standard, enabling us to test interventions under the real-world conditions and constraints in which providers operate.
We developed a model, the Readiness Assessment Model for Pragmatic Trials (RAPT), for use when discussing whether or not an intervention is ready for a pragmatic trial and, if so, how to design it. When conducting such a trial, we systematically capture data to understand the factors associated with providers’ ability to implement an intervention, continually refining our strategies based on what we learn.
We want our research to reach providers; our interventions to be packaged in ways that can be easily replicated; and our results to change practice. This means not only publishing in the peer-reviewed literature, but also thinking broadly and creatively about how we connect researchers with providers, policymakers, and other stakeholders to share effective interventions and encourage uptake.