Scaling up Evidence-Based Interventions Within the US Public Health Market

Abstract

The Mapping Advances in Prevention Science IV (MAPS-IV) Translation Research Task Force report provides an important enumeration of challenges and potential opportunities for improving extent of implementation of evidenced based interventions. The aspiration is for scientifically based prevention to be implemented widely enough to show population level shifts in incidence and prevalence. The MAPS-IV Task Force report by Fagan and colleagues (2019) provides a thoughtful and informative report that notes important exemplars towards that goal as well as key challenges and suggests strategies for greater impact across five publicly funded systems affecting human development. Comments are offered that center around the value of embedding prevention science within often larger and more sustained social and political forces as well as embracing scaling up within the complex funding streams in which prevention will be sustainable at scale. These include increasing attention to practical considerations that can affect how prevention is viewed, appreciated, and likely utilized as well as the ongoing challenge of how to relate evidenced based programs with the more prevalent and often preferred approaches of those deciding what is funded and what is actually implemented. This valuable contribution to Society for Prevention Research and prevention science is characterized as an important step toward strategies that might plausibly move prevention from primarily demonstration efforts to sustainable public health strategies integrated into the major systems of influence on human development.