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HIP collaborates annually with the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ) to sponsor a learning event on topics of current importance to health in Wisconsin. This year's event will showcase several national and state models that are successfully expanding access and integrating behavioral health services into primary care settings. HIP Investigator Rachel Grob will be speaking about HealthExperiencesUSA and the DIPEx methodology to elevate the patient voice in healthcare. The assembly will be held on October 16 at the Monona Terrace in Madison. Learn more and view the agenda for the assembly here.

Dr. Pascale Carayon, the Procter & Gamble Bascom Professor in Total Quality in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Dr. Maureen Smith, professor in the Departments of Population Health Sciences and Family Medicine & Community Health, were recently awarded $2.5 million from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to create a patient safety learning lab.

In the 4-year grant, entitled “Engineering Safe Care Journeys for Vulnerable Populations,” Drs. Carayon and Smith will collaborate with a transdisciplinary team of engineers, health services researchers, nurses, physicians, and pharmacists. They will develop, design, implement, and evaluate a patient safety passport that will support the safe journey of older adults diagnosed with a fall or suspected urinary tract infection in the emergency department.

Older adults over 65 are more likely to present to the emergency department and experience patient safety issues after the emergency department visit as compared to younger people. The innovative concept of patient safety passport will be used by patients, caregivers, and clinicians in the emergency department, hospital, and skilled nursing facility, and will facilitate communication and coordination as the patient transitions from the emergency department and travels to the hospital, skilled nursing facility, or home.

The Wisconsin Surgical Outcomes Research Program (WiSOR) recently released a new tool on HIPxChange, the Shared Decision Making Repository, to enable researchers and clinicians to easily locate and sort through a large collection of current literature on shared decision making instruments and avoid performing redundant literature searches. The tool compiles and catalogs over 70 qualitative and quantitative instruments that measure shared decision making, and can be easily sorted, filtered, or searched based on keywords, measure type, and who the instrument measures. You can view the tool for free here. 

Dr. Andrew Quanbeck was recently awarded two 5-year NIH grants totaling nearly $5 million to implement interventions for preventing and treating substance misuse in primary care.

He will be collaborating with HIP on the project, “Promoting the implementation of clinical guidelines for opioid prescribing in primary care using systems consultation.” The project addresses the change needed in the U.S. regarding the opioid crisis and prescribing practices by determining how to implement safer prescribing practices as efficiently and effectively as possible in primary care clinics. 

He will also be studying how the smartphone app "A-CHESS," which monitors the activity of people with alcohol use disorders and delivers interventions as needed, can facilitate healthier drinking patterns among primary care patients. 

Read more about Dr. Quanbeck's new studies here.

Dr. Maureen Smith, HIP Director, was recently featured in a video from the Wisconsin Partnership Program about her disparities project with the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality and the Collaborative Center for Health Equity. This project aims to develop and implement a publicly reported measure of disparity in the quality of care in Wisconsin and examine the sources of disparities in the quality of care. This video was introduced by HIP Outreach Specialist Lauren Bednarz, and shown at the Healthiest State Summit on September 20-21 in Green Bay, WI. You can watch the video below or at the link here.

A new toolkit to help researchers prepare patient advisors to work effectively with researchers is now available on HIPxChange. Patient Advisor Toolkit 1: Orientation for Patient Advisory Committees (PAT-1), developed by Betty Kaiser, PhD, RN and Gay Thomas, MA from the Wisconsin Network for Research Support (WINRS) is a comprehensive set of modifiable resources for conducting an orientation with patient advisors. The toolkit was developed for researchers who conduct clinical trials and want input from patient stakeholders to improve the design, implementation, and dissemination of their research. Researchers can use the toolkit to develop customized orientation programs for various groups of stakeholders and a wide variety of projects. It provides a complete, step-by-step guide to planning and conducting a patient advisor orientation, as well as following up after it is complete. 

PAT-2, in development, will be a complementary resource to help researchers plan and facilitate regular meetings with patient advisors. 

Dr. Elizabeth Cox recently discussed the benefits that the UW Fall Research Competition has had on her research career in a UW-Madison news article. As a multi-time recipient of the award, Dr. Cox has found that the funding can be a great way to start new collaborations or support mentoring a graduate student. She has also used the funding to conduct a pilot test of an intervention to address barriers to self-management for youth and teens with type 1 diabetes, and then went on to secure a 3-year extramural award to evaluate the impact of the intervention in a multi-site randomized, controlled trial.

The deadline to apply for the next cycle of the Fall Research Competition is September 21, 2018. For more information and to apply, see here.

HIP Investigators Meghan Brennan, MD and Heidi Brown, MD were recently awarded pilot funding through the University of Wisconsin - Madison Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (UW ICTR).  

Dr. Brennan will be identifying strategies to provide integrated care for rural patients with diabetic foot ulcers in collaboration with Dr. Christie Bartels, the Wisconsin Research & Education Network, and the Rural Wisconsin Health Cooperative. Approximately 2 million Americans develop diabetic foot ulcers every year, which results in amputations for 5% of those affected and death within 5 years for 50% of them. Dr. Brennan's research team has found that rural patients face even greater risks, and this study will aim to inform the design and future piloting of an intervention to pomote integrated care for rural patients with diabetic foot ulcers to help reduce these disparities.

Dr. Brown, in partnership with several programs and collaborators across the state, will be testing the effectiveness of an electronic delivery method for the "Mind Over Matter: Healthy Bowels, Healthy Bladder" (MOM) behavior change program for women with urinary or bowel incontinence. The MOM program has been demonstrated to improve incontinence by over 55%, but few women reported that they would be likely to attend an in-person program for this. An electronic version of MOM has the potential for a higher uptake of the program, and the long-term goal of this study is to improve the reach of the program by adapting the current workshop-based MOM curriculum to an electronic format, characterizing the reach of the electronic program, and assessing the demand for the electronic program.