What is the extent and quality of documentation and reporting of fidelity to implementation strategies: a scoping review
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Implementation fidelity is critical to the internal and external validity of implementation research. Much of what is written about implementation fidelity addresses fidelity of evidence-informed interventions rather than fidelity of implementation strategies. The documentation and reporting of fidelity to implementation strategies requires attention. Therefore, in this scoping review, we identify the extent and quality of documentation and reporting of fidelity of implementation strategies that were used to implement evidence-informed interventions. METHODS: A six-stage methodological framework for scoping studies guided our work. Studies were identified from the outputs of the Effective Practice and Organization of Care (EPOC) review group within the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. EPOC's primary focus, implementation strategies influencing provider behavior change, optimized our ability to identify articles for inclusion. We organized the retrieved articles from the systematic reviews by journal and selected the three journals with the largest number of retrieved articles. Using a data extraction tool, we organized retrieved article data from these three journals. In addition, we summarized implementation strategies using the EPOC categories. Data extraction pertaining to the quality of reporting the fidelity of implementation strategies was facilitated with an "Implementation Strategy Fidelity Checklist" based on definitions adapted from Dusenbury et al. We conducted inter-rater reliability checks for all of the independently scored articles. Using linear regression, we assessed the fidelity scores in relation to the publication year. RESULTS: Seventy-two implementation articles were included in the final analysis. Researchers reported neither fidelity definitions nor conceptual frameworks for fidelity in any articles. The most frequently employed implementation strategies included distribution of education materials (n = 35), audit and feedback (n = 32), and educational meetings (n = 25). Fidelity of implementation strategies was documented in 51 (71 %) articles. Inter-rater reliability coefficients of the independent reviews for each component of fidelity were as follows: adherence = 0.85, dose = 0.89, and participant responsiveness = 0.96. The mean fidelity score was 2.6 (SD = 2.25). We noted a statistically significant decline in fidelity scores over time. CONCLUSIONS: In addition to identifying the under-reporting of fidelity of implementation strategies in the health literature, we developed and tested a simple checklist to assess the reporting of fidelity of implementation strategies. More research is indicated to assess the definitions and scoring schema of this checklist. Careful reporting of details about fidelity of implementation strategies will make an important contribution to implementation science.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Metaresearch Domain: Reporting · Genre: Review About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Systematic review | low |
| gpt | Metaresearch Domain: Reporting · Genre: Review About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Systematic review | high |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.050 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it