Implementation science: An introduction for primary care

Implementation science is the scientific study of the use of strategies to adopt and integrate evidence-based health interventions into clinical and community settings to improve individual outcomes and benefit population health.1 This transdisciplinary field combines economics, management science, social sciences, psychology, public health, medicine, and other disciplines. Although implementation science has aligned goals with quality improvement to reduce the evidence-practice gap, the approaches are different in chronicity, use of theoretical models and generalizability, and the terms are not used interchangeably. The aim of this article is to highlight the role and key elements of implementation science in primary care research, and the benefits arising from application of its principles.