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Applying NUDGE to Inform Design of EBP Implementation Strategies in Community Mental Health Settings

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Abstract

We demonstrate the application of NUDGE (Narrow, Understand, Discover, Generate, Evaluate), a behavioral economics approach to systematically identifying behavioral barriers that impede behavior enactment, to the challenge of evidence-based practice (EBP) use in community behavioral health. Drawing on 65 clinician responses to a system-wide crowdsourcing challenge about EBP underutilization, we applied NUDGE to discover, synthesize and validate specific behavioral barriers to EBP utilization that directly inform the design of tailored implementation strategies. To our knowledge, this is the first study to apply behavioral economic insights to clinician-proposed solutions to implementation challenges in order to design implementation strategies. The study demonstrates the successful application of NUDGE to implementation strategy design and provides novel targets for intervention.

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Acknowledgements

We are especially grateful for the support that DBHIDS has provided for this project. We gratefully acknowledge Emily Becker-Haimes, Sriram Sridharan and Molly Candon for their assistance with hypothesis generation and confirmation. We would also like to thank all of the clinicians who participated in the innovation tournament and all who helped recruit those clinicians, making it possible.

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P50MH113840 (Beidas, Mandell, Volpp).

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Correspondence to Rebecca E. Stewart.

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Stewart, R.E., Beidas, R.S., Last, B.S. et al. Applying NUDGE to Inform Design of EBP Implementation Strategies in Community Mental Health Settings. Adm Policy Ment Health 48, 131–142 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10488-020-01052-z

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