Implementation strategies as characterized by effective practice and organization of care (EPOC) taxonomy list

Category	Subcategory	Definition
Interventions targeted at health care organizations	Organizational culture	Strategies to change organizational culture
Interventions targeted at health care workers	Audit and feedback	A summary of health workers’ performance over a specified period of time, given to them in a written electronic or verbal format. The summary may include recommendations for clinical action.
	Clinical incident reporting	System for reporting critical incidents
	Monitoring the performance of the delivery of healthcare	Monitoring of health services by individuals or health care organizations, for example, by comparing with an external standard
	Communities of practice	Groups of people with a common interest who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis
	Continuous quality improvement	An iterative process to review and improve care that includes involvement of health care teams, analysis of a process or system, a structured process improvement method or problem solving approach, and use of data analysis to assess changes
	Educational games	The use of games as an educational strategy to improve standards of care
	Educational materials	Distribution to individuals, or groups, of educational materials to support clinical care, that is, any intervention in which knowledge is distributed. For example, this may be facilitated by the internet, learning critical appraisal skills; skills for electronic retrieval of information, diagnostic formulation; question formulation
	Educational meetings	Courses, workshops, conferences, or other educational meetings
	Educational outreach visits, or academic detailing	Personal visits by a trained person to health workers in their own settings to provide information with the aim of changing practice.
	Clinical practice guidelines	Clinical guidelines are systematically developed statements to assist health care providers and patients to decide on appropriate health care for specific clinical circumstances (U.S. IOM). Within schools, this may include the development of best-practice nutrition or physical activity guidelines, which are then provided to school staff as instructional material to support the implementation of policies, practices, or programs.
	Interprofessional education	Continuing education for health professionals that involves more than one profession in joint, interactive learning
	Local consensus processes	Formal or informal local consensus processes, for example, agreeing a clinical protocol to manage a patient group, adapting a guideline for a local health system or promoting the implementation of guidelines
	Local opinion leaders	The identification and use of identifiable local opinion leaders to promote good clinical practice
	Managerial supervision	Routine supervision visits by health staff
	Patient-mediated interventions	The use of patients, for example, by providing patient outcomes, to change professional practice
	Public release of performance data	Informing the public about health care providers by the release of performance data in written or electronic form
	Reminders	Manual or computerized interventions that prompt health workers to perform an action during a consultation with a patient, for example, computer decision support systems
	Routine patient-reported outcome measures	Routine administration and reporting of patient-reported outcome measures to providers and/or patients
	Tailored interventions	Interventions to change practice that are selected based on an assessment of barriers to change, for example, through interviews or surveys