Narrowing the 17-Year Research to Practice Gap

eveloping evidence to improve clinical practice and disseminating it to be used by clinicians to improve outcomes for individual patients is important. How long does it take to get evidence into practice? The standard refrain of "17 years to move evidence into practice" is repeated by researchers and clinicians alike with despair. Rather than accepting the inevitability of a long lag in translating research to the bedside, we believe it is worthwhile to examine the origin of the "17-year gap," to scrutinize how it applies to interdisciplinary research in critical care, and to suggest ways to close that gap.