H06 – Separating the Signal from Noise: Helping Healthcare Systems and Practitioners Identify, Learn, and Implement Evidence-based Practices

Summary

Health care systems and behavioral health providers often have to balance competing demands making it difficult to keep up with changes in the evidence-base surrounding integrated primary care and specifically behavioral interventions. In addition, it is not easy to encourage, monitor, and improve evidence-based practices within one’s own and others’ work as it often requires time and behavior changes. Drs. Funderburk, Barron, and Mitzel, with Ms. Brockmann, will lead this presentation sharing evidence as well as clinical experiences from within the VA Center for Integrated Healthcare, a national center supporting embedded behavioral health providers in the VA. Initially, we will begin with a specific case example that exemplifies the problem. This example will incorporate and highlight data collected from a national survey of non-VA and VA embedded behavioral health providers (n=204) and supervisors of full-time non-trainee providers (n=49). We will highlight the top three barriers (e.g., time, knowledge, comfort) and facilitators (e.g., trainings, confidence, referrals) to incorporating evidence-based interventions into clinical practice as well as other contextual factors that can impact this process. Then, we will share existing resources within CFHA (e.g., evidence-briefs) and others that can help clinicians and administrators find evidence as well as eliminate the tendency to re-invent interventions. Finally, we will share practical strategies based on the literature and our own experiences on how to avoid common pitfalls and improve the translation of evidence into practice. For instance, we will share program evaluation data and lessons learned from the VA that suggests virtual competency-based training strategies are an effective alternative to in-person strategies. In addition, we will briefly share a current innovative approach designed to reduce drift following the initial development of a new clinical practice within the VA that we are piloting.