Specializing in implementation science, Beidas helps to close the gap between what we know and what we do.
You might think that when a scientific breakthrough occurs in medicine, doctors rush to put the latest discoveries into practice. But that’s rarely the case. Even when clinicians want to implement the latest evidence-based practices, studies show, they are successful less than one-third of the time. That’s where Rinad Beidas ’03 comes in. As chair of medical social sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, she specializes in the nascent but growing field of implementation science, which strives to translate research into reality.
“It’s about closing the gap between what we know and what we do,” Beidas explains. “We spend billions of dollars on discovery, but pay little attention to how we actually get those discoveries in place in the real world.” One need look no further than the COVID-19 vaccine to see why such efforts are so important, she says. After a spectacularly successful moonshot effort to develop a vaccine in less than a year, the distribution of the vaccine was plagued by delays, supply disruptions, and misinformation. “There was such inequitable access,” Beidas says. “It was such a missed opportunity.”
Beidas witnessed such missed opportunities at a young age. Born in Amman, Jordan, she came with her parents to the U.S. at age 2. Her mother earned her graduate degree in communications from Northwestern, while her father completed his medical training at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn, in a safety net hospital that treats all patients regardless of their ability to pay. “He would come home every night and tell me stories about how difficult it was for his patients to have access to high-quality, evidence-based care. I had this deep-seated outrage that health care wasn’t a right afforded to everybody.”
Coming to Colgate to study literature, she was inspired by a first-year psychology class. “It ignited a passion in me to understand human behavior,” says Beidas, who went on to write an honors thesis on the formation of false memories with mentor Doug Johnson, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of psychological and brain sciences. “I fell in love with the scientific process, of answering questions and using those answers to come up with the next set of questions.” She then earned a PhD in clinical psychology at Temple University in 2011. There she watched children suffering from pediatric anxiety get better after undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), the gold standard for treatment. Unfortunately, many children treated did not have access to the treatment in community settings.
Working with a visionary mental health commissioner in Philadelphia trying to implement CBT more broadly, Beidas studied what was most successful in instituting that practice. She found while training individual clinicians was necessary, higher-level organizational leadership and culture were most important to inculcating change. “Clinicians are doing the best they can with what they have,” Beidas says. “If you want to add on new approaches, you have to make sure that the organization is a supportive one.”
After becoming a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012, Beidas experienced personal tragedy when a family member died by suicide with a firearm. Beidas was at a doctor’s visit with her infant son when she had an epiphany. “I thought, this could be a great place for a conversation about secure firearms storage.” She adapted an intervention in which pediatricians discussed secure firearm storage, providing a cable lock in the office, and found that parents were highly receptive to hearing this message from a trusted pediatrician. Beidas has since completed a large trial funded by the National Institute of Mental Health in 30 clinics in Colorado and Michigan, and results are forthcoming.
This past year, Beidas took on her new position at Northwestern — becoming one of a small number of women and an even smaller number of non-MDs to chair a department at a medical school. The school, she says, wrote implementation science into their strategic plan. “Talk about institutional commitment,” she says. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Beidas works on implementation projects in diverse areas including cancer, HIV, and high cholesterol. When she started in the field more than a decade ago, Beidas notes, people barely knew what it was — now it’s catching on in medical schools around the country. “I feel passionate about implementation science as a tool to amplify the needs of our communities and ensure everyone has equitable access to benefit from scientific discoveries,” she says. “It’s the challenge of our time, and I feel so honored to have the opportunity to study it.”