Written by Kim Furlow, communications manager for the Institute for Public Health.
The Institute for Public Health’s Center for Dissemination and Implementation, the Brown School and the School of Medicine’s Infectious Disease Division at Washington University in St. Louis have collaborated to launch the Infectious Disease Dissemination and Implementation Science (IDDI) Initiative.
“The time is right for a collaborative effort in implementation science and a broad swath of challenges posed by infectious diseases,” says Elvin Geng, MD, initiative collaborator and director of the Center for Dissemination and Implementation. “COVID-19 has shown that the world is still susceptible to infectious pandemics, but COVID-19 is far from the only threat. Antimicrobial resistance threatens our most effective medications. For example, the HIV epidemic is still far from over, and influenza is still a major killer. Most of our challenges in infectious diseases, however, are marked by both the presence of efficacious interventions as well as our inability to use them at scale, consistently, equitably and sustainably. We need a unified implementation science agenda around all of these issues.”
According to WashU’s recent announcement in The Record, as led by Virginia McKay, Institute faculty scholar and research assistant professor at the Brown School, the initiative “is designed to cultivate local and applied research related to the uptake and implementation of evidence-based innovations, practices, procedures or policies that reduce the spread and improve the treatment of infectious diseases.” The IDDI will help support implementation research in sexually transmitted infections and HIV; COVID-19; and antimicrobial resistance. Over the next two years, the initiative aims to accomplish this through “pilot funding, grant development support, strengthening local partnerships, promoting research collaboration and fostering a national scientific conversation about these topics.”
For more information about the new initiative, e-mail Virginia McKay