# VA Office of Rural Health and QUERI Partnered Evaluation Center: Implementation, Sustainment, and Spread of Effective Programs to Improve the Health and Well-Being of Rural Veterans

> **NIH VA I50** · IOWA CITY VA MEDICAL CENTER · 2021 · —

## Abstract

Since 2007, VA Office of Rural Health (ORH) has supported enterprise wide initiatives (EWIs) and promising
practices to improve the health and well-being of rural Veterans. Program evaluation is required of projects to
drive improvement and determine if goals are being met. A comprehensive review of ORH-funded programs is
essential for identifying best practice and strategies to improve the quality and safety of care for rural Veterans
and to inform dissemination and implementation (D&I) science. However, this review has not been conducted.
We propose a partnership between QUERI and ORH’s Center for the Evaluation of Enterprise Wide Initiatives
to conduct a systematic review of EWI evaluations. The partnership will result in a synthesis of the portfolio of
ORH EWIs to support current projects and improve rural Veteran care by leveraging D&I science and CEEWI’s
leaders in the fields of D&I, program evaluation, and health services research.
 In FY19, the EWI program consisted of 55 ORH-supported initiatives that reach 97% of VA medical centers
in all 18 Veteran Integrated Service Networks (VISNs). A QUERI partnership with CEEWI will benefit ORH with
systematic documentation and standardization of EWI implementation and evaluation across the country. This
work will situate ORH as a leader in D&I by synthesizing its knowledge of ground-up program development and
implementation to be more widely generalizable. ORH has never sought to comprehensively examine
implementation strategies and outcomes across their portfolio. ORH’s CEEWI team, in partnership with
QUERI, seeks to improve its evaluation program and strengthen the long-term sustainment of its projects.
 ORH began the process of building an infrastructure for systematic evaluation by asking EWIs to use RE-
AIM as their evaluation framework. Recently, EWI evaluations have included Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption,
Implementation, and Maintenance outcomes. However, ORH program analysts have encountered a number of
barriers to the evaluation process and achieving full integration and operationalization of RE-AIM has been one
of the challenges. The CEEWI team will work closely with the ORH program analysts to understand the
specific challenges related to RE-AIM integration and to improve and standardize the EWI evaluation process.
 The specific aims of the QUERI partnership with CEEWI are to:
1) Identify implementation strategies and outcome measures described in ORH enterprise-wide initiatives
 (EWIs) evaluation reports and supplemental, qualitative interviews.
Conduct a content analysis of the EWI evaluations submitted to ORH and supplemental, qualitative interviews
to examine patterns of: a) Expert Recommendations for Implementing Change (ERIC) implementation
strategies (e.g., which strategies are used most frequently, how they are operationalized and adapted); and 2)
RE-AIM outcomes (e.g., how they are operationalized, key challenges).
2) Improve the ORH EWI evaluation process by insuring RE-AIM o...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10069271
- **Project number:** 1I50HX003145-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** IOWA CITY VA MEDICAL CENTER
- **Principal Investigator:** Heather Schacht Reisinger
- **Activity code:** I50 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** VA
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** —
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-07-01 → 2025-09-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10069271

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10069271, VA Office of Rural Health and QUERI Partnered Evaluation Center: Implementation, Sustainment, and Spread of Effective Programs to Improve the Health and Well-Being of Rural Veterans (1I50HX003145-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-21 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10069271. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*