Glasgow joins CU School of Medicine

Russell Glasgow, one of the nation’s top “implementation science” experts, has joined the University of Colorado School of Medicine to help direct a program that studies how to improve the connections between scientific research and patient care.

Glasgow assumed the role of associate director of the School’s Colorado Health Outcomes (COHO) research program and visiting professor in the Department of Family Medicine in September. He most recently was deputy director of implementation science at the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

Implementation science is an important effort to link the policymakers and the practitioners of medicine with scientists to apply their findings in the physicians’ offices and treatment centers and in the community, said Glasgow.

“It’s transdisciplinary,” Glasgow said. “We get these different groups to work together to understand each other’s perspectives, and to design for dissemination from the beginning, and that’s where there is something beyond the laboratory research, where we get from bench to bedside to community.”

Glasgow is a nationally known expert in studying ways to improve the translation of research into the health care delivery system and is a driving force behind a planning and evaluation model called RE-AIM.

RE-AIM originally was developed as a framework for consistent reporting of research results and more recently has been used to organize reviews of the existing literature on health promotion and disease management in different settings and to help plan interventions. The acronym stands for Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance, which together determine public health impact.

Since Glasgow and two colleagues wrote the initial paper in 1999, there have been more than 200 publications on RE-AIM by a variety of authors in fields as diverse as aging, cancer screening, dietary change, physical activity, medication adherence, health policy, environmental change, chronic illness self-management, well-child care, eHealth, worksite health promotion, women’s health, smoking cessation, quality improvement, weight loss, diabetes prevention, and practice-based research.

Glasgow was deputy director for implementation science at the U.S. National Cancer Institute from 2010 to 2013. His extensive experience includes working for the AMC Cancer Research Center from 1998 through 2002 and Kaiser Permanente Colorado’s Institute for Health Research from 2002 through 2010.