Assistant Professor Elizabeth Matthews has been awarded the Health for Data Action Award (HD4A) from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Congratulations, Dr. Matthews!
About the Award:
RWJF’s Health Data for Action (HD4A) program is designed to leverage health data for actionable insights. The program is aligned with the Foundation’s efforts to engage the health care sector in promoting population health and broader policy considerations. With greater access to health data, including data from delivery systems, as well as health information technology, researchers can better answer important questions to build a Culture of Health and inform health policy. HD4A aims to reduce the barriers often faced in accessing rich data by serving as a conduit between data owners and interested researchers. Through HD4A awards, RWJF will make valuable data from unique data owners available to researchers.
About Dr. Matthews’s Project:
Increasing access to high quality integrated primary care and behavioral health services is critical to addressing disparate health outcomes among individuals with serious mental illness (SMI) and chronic health conditions. Many individuals with SMI and chronic disease rely on federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) to receive care, though research examining the capacity of these clinics to deliver integrated behavioral health (IBH) is lacking. This study, Examining the capacity of Federally Qualified Health Centers to treat individuals with cooccurring serious mental illness and chronic disease, seeks to generate specific information about how individuals with SMI and chronic disease utilize IBH services within FQHCs, and what type of IBH leads to best outcomes for this group. Using data from the OCHIN ADVANCE data warehouse, which integrates community, organizational, and EHR data for over 6,389,086 individuals across 1,462 FQHCs, this study aims to identify individual , organizational and community-level factors affecting patterns of integrated behavioral health (IBH) service utilization among individuals with severe mental illness (SMI) and chronic disease, examine how patterns of IBH utilization affects service quality and clinical outcomes among this group, and explore whether patient, organizational and community level factors moderate this relationship.
