Recruitment and Engagement in Care to Impact Practice Enhancement (RECIPE) for Sickle Cell disease

The Recruitment and Engagement in Care to Impact Practice Enhancement (RECIPE) project has a goal to reduce the science-to-practice gap in sickle cell disease (SCD) by identifying individuals who are not receiving guideline based SCD care. Up to 50% of affected adults may not see SCD specialists, which limits the delivery of disease-specific screenings and treatment with disease modifying therapies. Issues are worsened for individuals living in rural regions or with socio-economic challenges known to accentuate health barriers. This team of investigators has been working to address this problem since the inception of the NHLBI-funded Sickle Cell Disease Implementation Consortium (SCDIC). In our previous studies, we identified a need to optimize research methodologies to engage individuals in evidence-based SCD care and established foundational terms through a Delphi consensus process, for “unaffiliated patients with SCD” and “SCD specialist”. The current project, RECIPE, will advance these efforts to identify and link unaffiliated patients to SCD specialists by applying implementation science research to adapt existing methods used in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) care. Similar to SCD, individuals with HIV have faced significant healthcare scrutiny causing reciprocal misgivings about healthcare. In this project, we will adapt models for patient identification and engagement in HIV to SCD using a multi-staged, patient-oriented process. We embed this work in the Interactive Systems Framework for Dissemination and Implementation to ensure high quality implementation and evaluation in each stage of the affiliation process, with emphasis on the readiness of health systems to serve traditionally hard-to-reach populations and sustainability of this work in these areas.