Transforming effective innovations into efficient interventions: contributions from social and implementation sciences

Abstract

The history of the fight against AIDS has been marked by the development of major scientific and biomedical innovations: antiretroviral treatments, rapid screening tests, pre-exposure prophylaxis... However, these innovations have often been insufficient on their own to curve the epidemics. It has also been essential to innovate in terms of funding, organisation of services and care, advanced “out-of-hospital” strategies, human rights, taking account of the specific characteristics of the most vulnerable populations, etc.

Effective innovation will be ineffective if it is not adapted to the social, cultural, and legal constraints faced by populations and to the structural, organisational, and economic constraints of healthcare systems. Hence the need for a genuine science of implementation that is necessarily interdisciplinary and intersectoral.