Around the country, print, broadcast and online media outlets are covering the groundbreaking work of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) leaders, scholars, fellows, alumni and grantees. Some recent examples:

RWJF Clinical Scholar Alan Teo, MD, MS, is the lead author of a study that finds the quality of a person’s social relationships influences the person's risk of major depression, regardless of how frequently their social interactions take place. “The magnitude of these results is similar to the well-established relationship between biological risk factors and cardiovascular disease,” Teo told Health Canal. “What that means is that if we can teach people how to improve the quality of their relationships, we may be able to prevent or reduce the devastating effects of clinical depression.”

RWJF recently announced the selection of 30 primary care practices as exemplary models of workforce innovation. The practices will serve as the basis for a new project: The Primary Care Team: Learning from Effective Ambulatory Practices (LEAP). Among them is CareSouth Carolina, the Hartsville Messenger reports. Learn more about the LEAP project and the practices selected for the program.

Low-income Oregonians who received access to Medicaid over the past two years used more health care services, and had higher rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduced financial strain than those without access to Medicaid, according to a study co-authored by RWJF Investigator Award in Health Policy Research recipient Amy N. Finkelstein, PhD, MPhil. The study found no significant effect, however, on the diagnosis or treatment rates of hypertension or high cholesterol levels.  Among the outlets to report on the findings: Forbes, the New York Times, the Washington Post Wonk blog, Health Day, and the Boston Globe Health Stew blog. Read more about Finkelstein’s research on the Oregon Medicaid system.

Olga Yakusheva, PhD, is an associate professor of economics at Marquette University. Richard C. Lindrooth, PhD, is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Both are grantees of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative.

Technological innovation is rapidly transforming patient care. A new generation of innovations will potentially change the most fundamental aspect of the patient experience – patients’ interactions with physicians and nurses. The FDA recently approved the first autonomous telemedicine robot for use in acute care hospitals. Even more advanced technologies, some capable of processing up to tens of millions of pages of plain medical text per second, are being tested and may soon be used to diagnose conditions and recommend treatment, with limited input from clinicians.

"We suggest that nurses should embrace rather than fear these innovations."

This new technology has the potential to perform several tasks more efficiently than clinicians, albeit with some limitations. It can quickly and effectively sift through large amounts of information and, based on a complex set of guidelines, create a probability-weighted list of diagnoses and recommendations. The result will be purely evidence-based and free of human cognitive decision-making biases.  The technology can drastically speed diffusion of new research and guidelines through electronic dissemination, similar to automatic software updates, and make most novel treatment regimens instantly available to patients.

Nancy Ryan-Wenger, PhD, RN, CPNP, FAAN, is the director of nursing research and an investigator at the Center for Innovation in Pediatric Practice at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. As a grantee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative (INQRI), she was a lead investigator of the first-ever study to systematically elicit the views of hospitalized children and adolescents on the quality of their nursing care, and also the first to evaluate children’s perceptions of nurses’ behavior for evidence of any disparities across demographic groups. This is part of a series of posts for National Nurses Week, highlighting how nurses are driving quality and innovation in patient care.

Have we asked the children?

That became a pressing question for me when I retired from academia after 30 years and joined the staff of Nationwide Children’s Hospital. I became aware of things that are highly important to hospitals, such as opinions of the quality of care. Yet when I saw the patient surveys at Nationwide, they were almost always completed by parents, and 80 percent of the questions were geared toward parents: Were they kept informed of their child’s condition? Did they have a comfortable place to sleep? Was their child treated kindly by staff member?

Those are important questions, certainly, but if you’re doing a patient survey, don’t you want to know what the patient thinks?

Have we asked the children?

Tracey L. Yap, PhD, RN, CNE, WCC, is an assistant professor at the Duke University School of Nursing, a John A. Hartford Foundation Claire M. Fagin Fellow, and a senior fellow at the Duke University Center for Aging and Human Development. With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative (INQRI), Yap and her co-investigators developed a cost-effective, nurse-led intervention that aimed to reduce the prevalence of pressure ulcers in long-term care facilities by increasing resident mobility through a musical prompting system specifically tailored to each facility. This is part of a series of posts for National Nurses Week, highlighting how nurses are driving quality and innovation in patient care.

It started with a boombox and the Byrds.

Those are hardly the first things that come to mind when you think about pressure ulcers, also referred to as bed sores—the wounds that are caused by continuous, unrelieved pressure on the skin and that often develop in people who have impaired mobility. Yet that’s just how my husband, a physician who has a large population of patients in long-term care, inspired this research by suggesting that I pursue a grant related to this serious issue.

At one long-term care facility, my husband had a maintenance person use a boombox over the public address system to play “Turn, Turn, Turn” at two-hour intervals. It was a creative, simple, and fun way to remind staff to move patients, and it appeared to be effective in preventing pressure ulcers.

We were in Kentucky at the time, and I was teaching at the University of Cincinnati College of Nursing. When I took my husband’s suggestion and applied for an INQRI grant, it radically changed my life—and the lives of many long-term care residents—for good. In my PhD studies, I’d focused on occupational health, and the INQRI grant helped me apply that knowledge in a new way and ultimately led to my current work at Duke University.

The following are among the many honors received recently by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) leaders, scholars, fellows, grantees and alumni.

The Chicago Parenting Program, an innovative program that supports healthy parenting and reduces behavioral problems among children, was recently added to the National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices, run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. RWJF Executive Nurse Fellow alumna Deborah Gross, DNSc, RN, FAAN, was a driving force behind the program, which is used by Head Start centers in Chicago and New York City, among others.  RWJF Nurse Faculty Scholar Susan Breitenstein, PhD, RN, PMHCNS-BC, and Executive Nurse Fellow alumna Sharon Tucker, PhD, RN, joined with Gross and others to conduct a study on the program, published in Research in Nursing & Health. It was recently named the journal’s Best Research Article award for 2012.

David Kindig, MD, PhD, RWJF Health & Society Scholars program director at the University of Wisconsin, and Health & Society Scholars program National Advisory Committee (NAC) member George Isham, MD, MS, co-chaired the Institute of Medicine’s Roundtable on Population Health Improvement, which is exploring factors beyond medical care that affect people's health. Among other participants in the Roundtable: RWJF Senior Program Officer Pamela Russo, MD, MPH, and Health & Society Scholars NAC Member James Knickman, PhD.

RWJF Health Policy Fellows alumna Carmen R. Green, MD, was appointed the University of Michigan Health System’s inaugural Associate Vice President and Associate Dean for Health Equity and Inclusion. In the position, Green will find and address inequalities in care, education and research, and promote health care careers to those from groups that are underrepresented in the field.

Sylvia Garcia, JD, a member of the RWJF Community Health Leaders program NAC, was elected to the Texas State Senate (District 6) in a run-off election to fill the seat previously held by the late state Sen. Mario Gallegos.

Around the country, print, broadcast and online media outlets are covering the groundbreaking work of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) leaders, scholars, fellows and grantees. Some recent examples:

A study led by RWJF/U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Clinical Scholars alumnus Jeffrey Kullgren, MD, MPH, finds that weight loss programs motivate patients to lose more weight when they offer financial prizes in group competitions, rather than individual rewards. MedPage Today and Medscape [registration required] report on the findings.

Healthcare Finance News reports on a study co-authored by RWJF Investigator Award in Health Policy Research recipient Mark A. Hall, JD, that finds insurers subject to the medical loss ratio requirements in 2011 spent less than one percent of premium revenue on quality improvements (0.74%) or rebates (0.35%). The researchers write that “current market forces do not strongly reward insurers’ investments in this area.”

In a post on the New York Times’ Room for Debate blog about prenuptial agreements, Investigator Award recipient Celeste Watkins-Hayes, PhD, writes: “There is no doubt that women need to be savvy about protecting their assets and ensuring that their contributions and hard work are valued, even in marriage. But prenups can only protect a certain demographic. What is needed is a comprehensive strengthening of all women’s safety nets through access to jobs that build wealth, increased financial literacy and a better infrastructure for raising children with or without a significant other.”

The impact and influence of INQRI’s work is explored in a special supplement of the journal Medical Care which published online this month. A blog carnival related to the supplement is now on the INQRI blog.

This is part of a series introducing programs in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Human Capital Portfolio.

A deceptively simple intervention has dramatically reduced the incidence of painful pressure ulcers among nursing home residents in Signature Healthcare facilities in Kentucky.  Every two hours, music is played throughout the nursing homes, prompting staff to go and check on residents and either ensure that they move or help them to move. This effective and easy intervention is the result of a study funded by the RWJF Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative (INQRI), which has provided funding to 40 interdisciplinary teams of researchers to investigate the link between nursing and the quality of patient care.

INQRI is the first effort of this size and scope to identify both the ways in which nurses improve the quality of patient care and keep patients safe, and the contributions nurses make to saving lives and keeping patients safer and healthier. INQRI research teams have examined such issues as: depression in nurses; the impact of nurse-to-patient staffing ratios on infection rates and on patient mortality; children’s assessments of hospital nursing care; fall prevention; differences in patient outcomes between Magnet and non-Magnet hospitals; and more. Each team includes a nurse researcher and at least one researcher from another field, such as business, economics, medicine, social work, pharmacy, and psychiatry.

On March 27, 2013, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative (INQRI) investigators Nancy Hanrahan, RN, PhD, and Phyllis Solomon, PhD, will present a webinar on their research translating a transitional care nursing intervention for people with serious mental illness for patients in public managed care.

The researchers’ Transitional Care Model for Persons with Serious Mental Illness (TCM-SMI) was designed to help psychiatric patients transition from hospitalization back into the community by providing 90 days of intensive hospital-to-home services. The nursing intervention proposed to reduce readmissions and depletion of scare public resources by these patients with complex needs.

The webinar will take place from 12-1 p.m. EST. It is part of a series featuring all of INQRI’s grantee teams focused on translating research into practice.

Register for the webinar.
Learn more about Hanrahan and Solomon’s research.

Around the country, print, broadcast and online media outlets are covering the groundbreaking work of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) leaders, scholars, fellows and grantees. Some recent examples:

Eating high-fat dairy products may raise breast cancer survivors' risk of dying years later, according to a nearly 15-year study led by RWJF Health & Society Scholars alumna Candyce Kroenke, ScD, MPH. Breast cancer survivors who ate one or more servings of high-fat dairy a day had a 49 percent higher risk of breast cancer death and a 64 percent higher risk of death from any cause, compared to those who consumed little or no high-fat dairy, Health Day reports. Kroenke hypothesizes that the elevated estrogen rates in milk fats, present because of the production methods common in the Western world, contribute to a relapse of breast cancer.  Fox News and MedCity News also reported on the findings.

A study funded by the RWJF Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative (INQRI) and the National Institute of Nursing Research finds that insufficient nurse staffing in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) can lead to high infection rates among the most vulnerable babies, which can lead to mortality or long-term developmental issues affecting the quality of their lives. Nurse.com, The Star-Ledger, HealthDay and The Lund Report are among the outlets to report on the findings. Read more about the study.

Politico reports on a study co-authored by RWJF Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research recipient Cathy J. Cohen, PhD, that finds young minorities are disproportionately affected by voter identification laws. “Significantly more” minority youths (age 18-29) were asked to show identification at the polls than white youth, the study finds. In addition, minority youth are much less likely to have one of the required forms of identification than white youth—a barrier that was a primary reason many minority youth did not vote in 2012, according to the study.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative (INQRI) will present the next webinar in its “Translating Research into Practice” series on March 12.

INQRI grantees Marita Titler, PhD, RN, FAAN, and Paul Conlon, PharmD, JD, will present their research on reducing falls in hospitals by implementing a risk specific fall prevention bundle. Titler and Conlon’s 18-month study implemented fall prevention interventions targeted to patient risk factors, and evaluated the use and impact of these practices.

The webinar will take place from 4-5 p.m. EST.

Register for the webinar.
Learn more about the research.