Abstract for: Using System Archetypes to Inform Implementation and Sustainability of a Restaurant Intervention to Improve Healthy Food Access

Healthy food interventions in restaurants often produce short-term improvements that decline once program support ends. A key challenge in implementation science is to identify strategies to make such interventions self-sustaining. In this WIP study, we use qualitative and quantitative system dynamics to support the exploration of intervention strategies. We began with a stock-and-flow model representing restaurant owner engagement, healthy food offerings, and customer interest. With this preliminary model, we identified several system archetypes and map them to “leverage points” in the healthy food intervention. In other words, we were able to explore ways to link system dynamics with implementation science. -The presence of tipping behavior in the model parameter space separating intervention-dependent and self-sustaining adoption regimes. -Links between the archetypes Limits to Growth, Shifting the Burden, Eroding Goals, and Success to the Successful to the components of the restaurant intervention. -Identification of the feedback mechanisms from customers to restaurant owners as critical links for sustained intervention effects. Our work demonstrates how system dynamics can identify intervention leverage points that strengthen reinforcing feedback. Because the restaurant intervention is ongoing, the implementation team can iteratively revise and adapt the intervention based on insights from the model. The data generated by the intervention will be used to update the model parameters, allowing the system dynamics model to evolve into an integral component of the implementation process. Assistance in translating the equations in the Vensim model to Python code.