Enhancing Occupational Therapy Interventions by Integrating the Multiphase Optimization Strategy Framework

Area of Science:

• Occupational therapy research
• Intervention development
• Health services research

Background:

• Growing evidence supports occupational therapy interventions.
• A gap exists between research findings and clinical practice.
• Efficient intervention development frameworks are needed.

Purpose of the Study:

• Introduce the Multiphase Optimization Strategy (MOST) framework.
• Advocate for MOST integration in occupational therapy intervention development.
• Highlight MOST's benefits for optimizing interventions.

Main Methods:

• Introduce MOST as an engineering-inspired framework.
• Describe MOST's systematic approach to intervention development and evaluation.
• Emphasize MOST's focus on effectiveness within constraints (affordability, scalability, efficiency).

Main Results:

• MOST enables systematic development and evaluation of optimized multicomponent interventions.
• Using MOST can reduce the time from intervention development to real-world implementation.
• Adopting MOST promotes rigorous research designs and shared terminology.

Conclusions:

• MOST is a valuable framework for occupational therapy intervention development research.
• Integrating MOST can accelerate the translation of research into practice.
• MOST fosters efficiency, effectiveness, and rigor in intervention science.