Faculty to Present at NIH-Sponsored Conference on Implementation Science

Associate Professors Michelle Munson and Victoria Stanhope and Assistant Professor Jennifer Manuel will present their National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded research at the 10th Annual Conference on the Science of Dissemination and Implementation in Health in Arlington, VA on December 4th to 6th. Presented by AcademyHealth and co-hosted by the NIH, the gathering is the leading national conference addressing the translation of evidence-based practices to real-world clinical and community settings.

Drs. Munson and Stanhope will both present on the conference’s first day as part of a panel on “Key Organizational Factors and Strategies that Promote Implementation of Research-based Practices.”

Dr. Munson’s team will present a paper on the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary impact of the Cornerstone Mentoring Program (CMP), which is embedded in Cornerstone, a multi-component psychosocial intervention at the center of a three-phase, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) funded study. CMP pairs transition-age youth with serious mental illnesses with a “Recovery Role Model,” who has had found success in managing their mental health challenges and serves as an older, wiser guide and mentor. Dr. Munson and her study team, which includes, among others, Dr. Stanhope, NYU Silver PhD candidate James Railey, and recent PhD graduates Andrea Cole and Shelly Ben-David, conducted and analyzed face-to-face interviews with 10 stakeholders and 20 multi-disciplinary experts on CMP’s feasibility and implementation strategy. Dr. Munson will report on the data, which indicate mentoring in mental health settings is feasible, acceptable, and has promise, and discuss the implications for future research. .

Dr. Stanhope will present a paper based on her NIMH funded clinical trial on Person-Centered Care Planning (PCCP) that explored the influence organizational factors have on training impact over time within Community Mental Health Clinics (CMHCs). With NYU Silver PhD candidate Mimi Choy-Brown, PhD student Lauren Jessell, and Fordham University Assistant Professor Abigail Ross, who received a Fordham-NYU Research Fellowship to work on the PCCP project this past summer, Dr. Stanhope conducted a longitudinal mixed-methods study examining a one-year training process at seven CMCHs. At each site, the training consisted of a two-day in-person presentation on PCCP for providers and one-year of monthly technical assistance calls. The study team analyzed the trainers’ monthly site ratings of implementation leadership and readiness as well as qualitative data from focus groups with providers to understand the training process. Among the findings were that training had less impact in the first six months compared with the second six months; implementation leadership, which became more proactive in the second six months, was positively correlated with implementation readiness; and that providers’ competing demands, lack of buy-in, and lack of infrastructure support posed implementation barriers.  

Dr. Manuel will be presenting two posters at the conference. The first will be part of a poster session on patient-level interventions in clinical care settings. It describes her NIDA-funded adaptation and pilot test of Critical Time Intervention (CTI) for people transitioning from long-term residential substance abuse treatment, and details barriers & facilitators to implementing CTI with this population. The second will be part of a poster session on behavioral health. It describes organizational barriers and facilitators to developing a model for system-wide change for youth and young adults aging out of public systems of care. It is based on a New York City Council funded study, on which Dr. Munson is the Principal Investigator, that emerged from an ongoing research collaboration between NYU Silver and the Jewish Board of Children and Family Services.  

Drs. Munson, Stanhope and Manuel are just three of the NYU Silver faculty at the forefront of implementation science, a relatively new field that aims to bridge the science to services gap.