Recognizing that pockets of excellence in safety and effectiveness exist there is concern that local cases of success in translating research into practice are often difficult to replicate or sustain over time. Factors that make a change improvement work in one setting versus another are largely unknown. To fill this gap, the Improvement Science Research Network (ISRN) was developed (Stevens, 2010). The ISRN is an open research network for the study of improvement strategies in healthcare. The national network offers a virtual collaboratory in which to study systems improvements in such a way that lessons learned from innovations and quality improvement efforts can be spread for uptake in other settings. The ISRN was developed in response to an NIH call for projects that build infrastructures to advance new fields of science.
The ISRN supports rigorous testing of improvement strategies to determine whether, how, and where an intervention for change is effective. The following shortcomings in research regarding improvement change strategies have been noted: studies do not yield generalizable information because they are performed in a single setting; the improvement intervention is inadequately described and impact imprecisely measures; information about sustainability of change is not produced; contexts of implementation are not accounted for, cost or value is not estimated; and such research is seldom systematically planned (IOM, 2008b).