Wider adoption of evidence-based, health promotion practices depends on developing and testing effective dissemination approaches. Several conceptual frameworks have been developed to organize the extensive literature on diffusion and dissemination of evidence-based practices. These frameworks are useful for generating hypotheses for future research, but no practical framework exists for developing and testing dissemination approaches. Such a framework would serve as a guide to dissemination for community-based organizations and help researchers develop and test approaches to dissemination of evidence-based practices.

The HPRC framework acknowledges that practices can spread either passively or actively. The “diffusion” arrow illustrates that some evidence-based practices spread passively and are adopted without additional support or instigation from outside the user organization. Researchers and disseminators build a mutually beneficial collaborative partnership. The partnership can be initiated by either party and, in our experience, is most effective when the research team and the disseminator are trying to reach the same user organizations and are willing to learn about each other’s resources and goals. Building on this learning, both the researchers and the disseminator are better equipped to design and test dissemination approaches that fit the disseminator’s goals and capacity.