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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.

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).  

The Database of Patient Experiences (DIPEx) methodology used to develop HealthExperiencesUSA.org, a website that brings patients' voices to American healthcare, was recently featured in articles in both the New York Times and USA Today as an important resource that can enable patients with depression to identify with others who suffer from the disease.

Dr. Heather Johnson was recently invited to participate in the Wisconsin Hypertension Symposium, which brought together clinical providers, policy makers, health insurers, and state and national organizations such as the American Medical Association and the American Heart Association to develop action plans to improve hypertension diagnosis and control in Wisconsin. Dr. Johnson's research showing that young adults are less likely to be diagnosed and treated for hypertension was reference during the symposium to demonstrate disparities in hypertension care between populations in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality recently released the Rural Wisconsin Chronic Disease Toolkit, and updated the Toolkit for Improving Hypertension Care & Outcomes and the Toolkit for Improving Diabetes Care & Outcomes.

Dr. Elizabeth Cox, in collaboration with Tonya Roberts from the School of Nursing, was recently awarded one of eight grants from the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment. In this two-year project, they will collaborate with stakeholders from community nursing homes in Wisconsin to for a sustainable nursing home network, with the ultimate goal of sharing and implementing strategies to engage families in the care of community nursing home residents. To date, family engagement in nursing homes has  been one of the least recognized and most unstructured quality improvement strategies.

Individuals in Wisconsin can now view the prevalence of obesity at the Zip Code level. The Obesity Prevention Initiative, funded through the Wisconsin Partnership Program, has released a report that was co-authored by HIP staff Lauren Bednarz, MPH and Maureen Smith, MD, PhD, MPH, along with an interactive mapping tool on the Wisconsin Health Atlas website, that describes the obesity epidemic in Wisconsin.

Dr. Sarina Schrager in the UW Department of Family Medicine and Community Health and Terry Little in the UW Department of Radiology recently published the Breast Cancer Screening Shared Decision Making Toolkit. The goal of the toolkit is to help primary care providers engage in discussions with average risk women regarding breast cancer screening. The toolkit includes resources and supporting materials that offer health care providers information on topics such breast cancer risk factors, assessment, shared deciison making principles, and benefits and harms of breast cancer screening. View the toolkit on HIPxChange here.