Communication and Dissemination Strategies to Facilitate the Use of Health Related Evidence

This review sought to provide evidence for how to best communicate and disseminate evidence, including uncertain evidence to inform health care decisions. A secondary objective was to examine how the effectiveness of communication and dissemination strategies varies across target audiences, namely patients and clinicians. Principal Investigator: Stacey Sheridan, M.D. Funding: AHRQ

Improving Colon Cancer Screening for Diverse Populations

Diverse, vulnerable populations, especially Latinos, have low colon cancer screening rates. These groups are disproportionately affected by the many patient, provider, and system-level barriers that inhibit colon cancer screening. Latinos, the nation’s largest and fastest growing racial/ethnic minority group, face additional language and cultural barriers. Reducing disparities in colon cancer screening among vulnerable populations is… Read more »

A Systematic Review of Empathy Development in Medical Education

Understanding how empathy can be developed in medical education is an important component of advancing humanistic medicine. Two recent reviews of changes in empathy among medical students and residents reached disparate conclusions. In a systematic review, Neumann and colleagues (2011) determined that empathy declines during medical training as students engage more with patients. Colliver et… Read more »

Tweeting to Health

We hypothesize that our intervention, Tweeting to Health, can motivate and create behavioral changes that lead to healthier lifestyles and foster social support to help facilitate these changes through the novel use of Twitter, a social media platform, and FitBit technology

North Carolina IMPaCT: Advancing and Spreading Primary Care Transformation

For the IMPaCT project, we will enhance our current efforts by conducting a regional leadership development program that will enhance the effectiveness of the regional medical and quality improvement leaders. We will also enhance our current patient-centered medical home change package to included focused attention on the role of primary care in transitions between care settings.

Southern Piedmont Beacon Community Project (SPBC Project)

The SPBC Project builds on this community’s current advanced usage and penetration of health information technology (HIT) lo create a learning laboratory for the next generation of community-based HIT-enabled improvements to health and care.