ODHIN is a Europe wide project involving research institutions from nine European countries that will help to optimize the delivery of health care interventions by understanding how better to translate the results of clinical research into every day practice. ODHIN will use the implementation of identification and brief intervention (IBI) programmes for hazardous and harmful alcohol consumption (HHAC) in primary health care (PHC) as a case study. There is strong evidence for the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of IBI in reducing HHAC and its consequences, which include more than 60 clinical diagnoses and conditions. A series of systematic reviews investigating the impact of different behavioural, organizational and financial strategies in changing provider behaviour across a range of clinical lifestyle interventions will be undertaken. The knowledge base of potential barriers and facilitators to implementing IBI will be updated. A stepped cluster randomised controlled trial will be undertaken with five arms and three time phases to test the incremental effect of strategies. Phase A will aim at raising awareness, insight, and acceptance of performance of IBI in PHC. Phases B and C will aim at acceptance, change and maintenance of implementation with financial and organisational strategies used in a different order to test the impact of both separately and in sequence. Modelling studies will test the impact of different IBI approaches on changes in alcohol consumption and the resulting impacts on healthcare costs and health-related quality of life. ODHIN will build a clinical evidence-based database on effective and cost-effective IBI measures for use in PHC and will develop a tool to assess the extent of provision of clinical practice. A project website and a series of scientific publications, reports and fact sheets will widely disseminate the documented and evaluated conceptual models across diverse health care settings throughout Europe.