The UF College of Public Health and Health Professions hosted its 32nd annual Research Day on April 4 at the Curtis M. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. The event featured 113 poster presentations by undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and associates.
Three top posters were selected for $500 travel awards. The winners are:
1st place
Young-Rock Hong, department of health services research, management and policy
“Development and Validation of Social Determinants of Health (SDH) Risk Assessment Tool: The HMCVD Index”
Mentor: Arch Mainous, Ph.D.
2nd place
Jayoung Kim, department of speech, language, and hearing sciences
“Magnitude Estimation of Respiratory Resistive Loads, Urge-to-Cough Sensitivity and Swallowing Safety in Parkinson’s Disease”
Mentor: Karen Hegland, Ph.D.
3rd place
Chantel Ulfig, department of clinical and health psychology
“The Effects of a Cognitive Behavioral Intervention on Worry about Cancer Progression among Women with Gynecological Malignancies”
Mentor: Deidre Pereira, Ph.D.
Vincent Mor, Ph.D., the Florence Pirce Grant Professor of Medical Science in the department of health services, policy and practice at Brown University’s School of Public Health, gave the event’s keynote presentation, “Designing and Disseminating the Next Generation of Interventions for Persons with Dementia.”
Mor is the director of the Research Career Training Program Core at the Center on Health Services Training and Research, and the Center for Long Term Care Innovation and Quality. He is a research health scientist at the Providence Veterans Administration Medical Center and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He has evaluated the impact of programs and policies in aging and long-term care, including Medicare funding of hospice, changes in Medicare nursing home payment and the introduction of quality measures. He was one of the authors of the congressionally-mandated Minimum Data Set for Nursing Home Resident Assessment and the architect of an integrated Medicare claims and clinical assessment database used for policy analysis, pharmaco-epidemiology and population outcome measurement.
In his presentation, Mor described studies of non-pharmaceutical interventions developed to ameliorate disturbed behavior among people with dementia, including a personalized music program for nursing home residents. He explained challenges researchers face when working with health care systems to implement their interventions on a large scale.
“The gap between what your program was when you put it together and how it gets implemented can be quite substantial,” Mor said. “It’s our job to help in that process of translation.”
Mor presented a framework he designed to help scientists evaluate the readiness of an intervention for dissemination into health care systems called the Readiness Assessment for Pragmatic Trials.
“I believe it’s our responsibility to partner with health care systems to implement the most salient features of these kinds of interventions in a way that can be implemented and actually done for and by the health care system for their patients,” he said.
The lecture is available to view at https://bit.ly/2TM0UEX.