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Advancing Diversity in Implementation Leadership Initiative

QUERI’s Advancing Diversity in Implementation Leadership (ADIL) initiative fosters implementation, quality improvement, and evaluation leadership opportunities for early career investigators and staff. The ADIL initiative provides support for candidates from diverse backgrounds to participate in hands-on mentoring, training, and educational opportunities, including leading a non-research project that aligns with one or more VA priorities and focuses on improving the health and care of all Veterans.

Since the initiative was launched in February 2021, 16 ADIL awardees have been funded. These investigators have launched evaluations to address a range of VA priorities, including workforce, access to care, virtual care, and caregiver support, and support the health needs of high priority Veteran populations (e.g., homelessness-experienced Veterans). ADIL awardees have gone on to hold clinical leadership positions and lead national evaluations of VA programs and policies. For example, ADIL awardee Dr. Tanya Olmos-Ochoa is now a multiple principal investigator for the QUERI LEARN Evidence-Based Policy Evaluation Center, where she is partnering with the Office of Patient Centered Care and Cultural Transformation and the VHA Reduce Employee Burnout and Optimize Organizational Thriving (REBOOT) Task Force to evaluate the Chief Wellbeing Officer initiative. As another example, Dr. Joshua Hamer was offered a new position as a clinical leader in quality improvement at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center because of his ADIL project VA Training to Recognize Early Alzheimer’s and Treat (VA TREAT) Cognitive Decline.

QUERI welcomes a new ADIL awardee!

Michelle S. Wong, PhD, of HSR’s Center for the Study of Healthcare Innovation, Implementation, and Policy (CSHIIP), is working on the ADIL project “Incorporating Health Equity into Evidence-Based Quality Improvement.” This project aims to evaluate an adaptation that incorporates health equity in an evidence-based quality improvement implementation (EBQI) strategy. The evaluation will inform how to improve this EBQI health equity adaptation and, more broadly, how to include this adaptation in other EBQI implementation projects and EBQI training. Dr. Wong is being mentored by Donna Washington, MD, MPH, Associate Director for Health Equity Research at CSHIIP.