A flexible framework for planning and evaluating early-stage health interventions: FRAME-IT

Health interventions exhibit three stages of maturity: early-, mid-, and late-stages. Early-stage interventions have innovative content necessitating evaluation; however existing evaluation frameworks omit constructs and guidelines relevant to this evaluation. Early-stage interventions require planning and evaluation that supports creating, testing, and exploring content to establish general feasibility and enable refinement for further testing, prior to randomised controlled trialling and wider dissemination. Feasibility, Reach-out, Acceptability, Maintenance, Efficacy, Implementation, Tailorability (FRAME-IT) was developed for a mixed methods feasibility study of a novel well-being intervention. FRAME-IT was conceived as a complementary framework to Reach, Efficacy, Adoption, Implementation, Maintenance (RE-AIM; Glasgow et al., 1999) which is better suited for mid- and late- stage interventions. FRAME-IT is proposed to support: (1) early-stage intervention planning and design, by guiding research focus and data sourcing strategy with relevant constructs; (2) comprehensive evaluation, by including constructs appropriate for early-stage interventions, i.e. feasibility, acceptability, and tailorability; (3) future intervention scalability, by including and adapting some of RE-AIM’s constructs to encourage a smoother translation of research into practice as interventions are scaled-up.