Rapid, Responsive, and Relevant?: A Systematic Review of Rapid Evaluations in Health Care

Changing health-care climates mean evaluators need to provide findings within shorter time frames, but challenges remain in the creation of rapid research designs capable of delivering quality data to inform decision-making processes. We conducted a review of articles to grapple with these challenges and explore the ways in which rapid evaluations have been used in health care. We found different labels being used to define rapid evaluations and identified a trend in the design of evaluations, where evaluators are moving away from short studies to longer evaluations with multiple feedback loops or cyclical stages. Evaluators are using strategies to speed up evaluations: conducting data collection and analysis in parallel, eliminating the use of transcripts, and utilizing larger evaluation teams to share the workload. Questions persist in relation to the suitability of rapid evaluation designs, the trustworthiness of the data, and the degree to which evaluation findings are used to make changes in practice.