Addiction healthcare is a multi-component, multi-stakeholder, complex, adaptive system. Determinants of healthcare including a range of strategic priorities and funding models, and multiple clinical processes, activities, events, interactions, and outcomes. Diverse stakeholder groups include patients with particular characteristics and needs, and organisational players with different roles and interests subject to varying levels of regulatory control.
When innovation is introduced, health systems do not respond in predictable ways, significantly increasing the risk of implementation failure. Despite the seeming dynamism within the system, there is also a paradoxical observation of healthcare tending towards inertia. Healthcare systems, organisations, and stakeholders can be resistant to change, especially where the rationale and benefits are not fully understood.
Consequently, innovations, including evidence-based health care interventions, often languish without being adopted by healthcare systems. Public funds to develop innovation to reduce the risk of harm and death associated with substance use and addictive behaviours must therefore include the application of implementation science to ensure commensurate returns on public investment.
DigitAS St Andrews delivers research and implementation science to support the development and embedding of innovation in addiction healthcare. We create networks of shared knowledge and are committed to an inclusive design philosophy based on person-centredness, accessible communication, collaboration, co-creation and continuous improvement.
Our portfolio of activities is organised into three complementary workstreams:
Implementation Science and systems thinking
Engaging with the complexity of interactions that shape the delivery, uptake and outcomes of addiction treatment – and generating evidence of the most effective solutions for local contexts.
Data science
Generating and analysing data to improve the surveillance, prevention, and management of key risks to individual and population health.
Overdose prevention, detection and response
Helping people who use drugs to avoid fatal and non-fatal overdose. Detecting the onset of overdose and triggering timely, life-saving responses.
We also support emerging clinicians and academics by supervising medical student projects related to digital and other innovations in addiction care.