| Sumario: | • Problem statement: Like several allied health fields, the hand and upper extremity rehabilitation profession is susceptible to the 17-year "research-to-practice gap," jeopardizing the extent to which patients with upper extremity injuries receive evidence-based care in a timely manner. • Purpose: This article will introduce the hand and upper extremity rehabilitation profession to implementation science—a field dedicated to examining the methods and strategies that expedite the uptake of research discoveries into routine healthcare practice. • Goals: By the end of this article, readers will be able to (1) define implementation science and its role in overcoming barriers to using evidence in practice, (2) describe how researchers and practitioners can design studies to test implementation strategies and evaluate implementation outcomes, and (3) understand the need for the hand and upper extremity rehabilitation profession to adopt implementation science principles in both research and practice contexts. The development of effective interventions in hand and upper extremity rehabilitation is critically important; yet even the most promising interventions may not successfully be implemented in practice. Occupational and physical therapists who provide specialized hand and upper extremity rehabilitation services ("hand therapists") can face extensive, multi-level barriers when attempting to use research findings in real-world settings, widening the long-standing research-to-practice gap. Concepts from the field of implementation science can be leveraged to address this gap and expedite the application of research discoveries that can maximize treatment outcomes of the musculoskeletal upper extremity client. As the intersection of hand and upper extremity rehabilitation and implementation science draws growing attention, there is a great need for researchers and clinicians to infuse implementation science into the hand and upper extremity rehabilitation research and practice contexts. The purpose of this article is to define implementation science and synthesize several studies from the hand and upper extremity rehabilitation field that have examined the effect of implementation strategies (eg, chart audit and feedback techniques; implementation teams) on implementation outcomes (eg, acceptability, fidelity). We also present recommendations for how (1) hand and upper extremity rehabilitation researchers can design studies to examine both patient outcomes and implementation outcomes relative to interventions for the musculoskeletal upper extremity and (2) hand and upper extremity rehabilitation specialists and administrators can develop implementation teams to facilitate the use of evidence in practice. Collaboration between researchers and clinicians has great potential to advance the entirety of the hand and upper extremity rehabilitation profession, especially when such collaborations are guided by the implementation science field.
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