Our Team

Dr. Lisa Saldana received intensive training in implementation science and methods (2011 NIH Training Institute for Dissemination and Implementation Research in Health—TIDIRH; 2011-2012 Implementation Research Institute—IRI R25MH080916). Since that time, she has served in the role of faculty and mentor to subsequent fellows in each of these programs. Further, she was an early career scientist for a Center focused on implementation methods (P30MH074678; Landsverk). Dr. Saldana also participated in the Institute of Medicine Innovations in Design and Utilization of Measurement Systems to Promote Children’s Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Health. She has learned through these experiences and those described below, the importance of stakeholder engagement and developing methods to effectively communicate implementation needs to different constituent groups outside of traditional research settings.

Dr. Saldana’s perspective is heavily influenced by her work evaluating implementation processes with the Stages of Implementation Completion (SIC) tool. The SIC was developed as part of a large implementation trial (R01MH076158-01A1; Chamberlain). She took the lead in developing the SIC as a measure of the implementation process and demonstrated that the SIC can accurately predict implementation outcomes. These findings were replicated when the SIC was extended to other EBPs in other service sectors including juvenile justice, child welfare (CW), substance use treatment, and schools (R01MH097748-01A1; PI). The SIC is a web-based tool, has been adapted or customized for over 45 practices, and is being utilized across a number of federally funded, state-initiated, and country-wide scale-up projects. The SIC team has learned about the “universal” or common implementation activities across EBPs that have demonstrated success in large-scale and further developed the Cost of Implementing New Strategies (COINS) cost mapping procedure as a method for collecting and highlighting implementation resource information. Using this knowledge, her team is in the process of rigorously evaluating the integration of the SIC into standardized intervention coaching models, to assess if SIC-Coaching improves the successful implementation of EBPs (R01 DA044745-01).

Dr. Saldana also has a research focus on intervention development and the prevention of child welfare involvement due to parental substance abuse. She is the developer of the FAIR model for the treatment of parental methamphetamine and opioid abuse, and the R3 Supervisor Strategy for child welfare workforce supervisors.