Implementation Outcomes of Community Health Worker Programs for Chronic Disease Self-Management

Abstract

Community Health Worker (CHW) programs providing chronic disease self-management are effective at improving health outcomes and reducing costs in health care systems. CHW programs lack widespread adoption – a research-to-practice gap spanning decades of gold-standard evidence. Implementation Science offers methods to develop evidence beyond effectiveness that addresses successful implementation. The results inform the necessary preconditions to CHW program success, which can enable adoption, scale, and spread. The studies presented here propose implementation science methods to study CHW programs at different stages of development, from pilot programming (early), initial implementation and trialing (middle), and sustained adoption (late).