Kentucky HSR Development II

The overall goal of the Kentucky HSR Continuation Project is to sustain a stream of health services research funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by improving institutional infrastructure and capacity, and promoting collaboration of family physicians with other health services researchers. This is a collaborative research development effort by the University of Kentucky School of Public Health, the Center for Health Services Manageme t and Research, the Department of Family Practice & Community Medicine, and the Martin School of Public Policy an Administration. The Aims of the project are (1) To improve faculty capacity to develop research ideas into fundable proposals and written publications; (2) To promote the collaboration of physicians with other health services researchers across campus; and (3) To cultivate research ideas from the Kentucky Ambulatory Network (KAN) into research designs and fundable proposals. This project includes three Investigator-Initiated Projects. (1) The first two-year project, "Designing Support for Colorectal Screening Decisions," proposes to explore how providers make decisions regarding colorectal cancer screening and develop decision aids to infonn providers' decisions to deliver an patients' decisions to utilize colorectal cancer screening. (2) A second thee-year project, "Quality Improvement in Telephone Medicine," proposes to advance the state of knowledge about telephone medicine in the ambulatory practic setting. The project will (a) analyze the telephone medicine systems at the University of Kentucky from a systems perspective, looking for potential threats to patient safety and (b) develop and field-test a systems-based method for evaluating and redesigningthe handhng of telephone calls in a residency setting to maximize patient safety and i efficiency. (3) A third one-year project in year three, "Participatory Development of a Generic Detailing Program witl a Primary Care Research Network," will distribute generic drug samples in an office-based primary care res~arch network and track the effect of generic sampling on physician and patient behavior. Each of these three projects involves the collaboration of academic family physicians with health services research scientists at the University of Kentucky. The three projects address AHRQ research priorities of prevention, patient safety/quality, and translational research involving costs respectively.