A Model for Advancing Scale-Up of Complex Interventions for Vulnerable Populations: the ALACRITY Center for Health and Longevity in Mental Illness

Many of the most pressing health issues in the USA and worldwide require complex, multi-faceted solutions. Delivery of such solutions is often complicated by the need to reach and engage vulnerable populations facing multiple barriers to care. While the fields of quality improvement and implementation science have made valuable gains in the development and spread of individual strategies to improve evidence-based practice delivery, models for coordinated deployment of numerous strategies to simultaneously implement multiple evidence-based interventions in vulnerable populations are lacking. In this Perspective, we describe a model for this type of comprehensive research-practice translation effort: the Johns Hopkins ALACRITY Center for Health and Longevity in Mental Illness, which is focused on reducing premature mortality in the population with serious mental illness. We describe the Center’s conceptual framework, which is built upon an integrated set of quality improvement and implementation science frameworks, provide an overview of the Center’s organizational structure and core research-practice translation activities, and discuss our vision for how the Center may evolve over time. Lessons learned from this Center’s efforts could inform models to address other critical health issues in vulnerable populations that require multi-component solutions at the policy, system, provider, and patient levels.