Providing Underserved Patients With Medical Homes: Assessing the Readiness of Safety-Net Health Centers

Surveys safety-net health centers' potential to become patient-centered medical homes based on eight change concepts to improve care delivery, efficiency, and health outcomes. Outlines challenges, areas for improvement, and strategies for transformation

Rethinking Honors Curriculum in Light of the AP/IB/Dual Enrollment Challenge: Innovation and Curricular Flexibility

Annmarie Guzy’s lead article for this volume speaks of a familiar challenge in the Eastern Kentucky University Honors Program. The nearly universal and dramatic increase in the number of AP, IB, and/or Dual Enrollment credit hours among our incoming first-year honors students over the past two decades served as the primary impetus for a major curricular overhaul within our program in 2013. The result—what we call our new (post-2013) “Honors Flex” curriculum—was initially a source of considerable anxiety among many of our faculty as well as some of our students and alumni. In retrospect, however, we are able to see that our willingness to enact fundamental change at the heart of our honors program has opened up new creative possibilities for our students, faculty, and university community. While AP/IB/Dual Enrollment credit did, in fact, contribute to what Guzy terms a perceived “admissions crisis,” we have found that our response to the challenge provided an important opportunity to rethink and reimagine the nature of honors education on our campus

Guiding Transformation: How Medical Practices Can Become Patient-Centered Medical Homes

Describes in detail eight change concepts as a guide to transforming a practice into a patient-centered medical home, including engaged leadership, quality improvement strategy, continuous and team-based healing relationships, and enhanced access

High-Impact Honors Practices: Success Outcomes among Honors and Comparable High-Achieving Non-Honors Students at Eastern Kentucky University

Alexander Astin’s Inputs-Environment-Outcomes (I-E-O) model for longitudinal study of student success in higher education challenges researchers to account explicitly for the wide range of educational, social, and cultural backgrounds that students bring with them to college. Astin’s approach factors in an understanding that educational outcomes are associated not only with the various educational environments to which students are exposed during their college years, but also with the inputs of these students—the factors that shaped them long before they first arrived in a university classroom. Meaningful conclusions concerning factors that contribute to student success must take into account the complex interactions of all three of the I-E-O components. Inputs precede and inform student choices of and attitudes toward their environments, and both play significant and interrelated roles in shaping educational outcomes for each student (Astin 1993)

4. Trauma Responsive School Implementation Assessment

The TRS-IA is an evidence-informed self-assessment that can be quickly and efficiently used to identify trauma responsive programming and policy domains of strengths, as well as areas with greater room for improvement.https://digitalcommons.imsa.edu/eae_scorecard/1003/thumbnail.jp

Can Pay-for-Performance Improve Quality and Reduce Health Disparities?

The authors discuss a new study that examined whether pay-for-performance improves or worsens existing disparities in health between ethnic groups

The System: Social Group

Research and Capstone projects Building on the 2017 fall semester and insights from the Fall 2017 trip to Los Angeles, student working groups will predict the future of a system or related issue for an audience of their peers, offering reflections on navigating that future. These projects might take the form of posters, video installations, original speculative fiction, or mixed media that will be incorporated into the atmosphere of a campus party, both to maximize the student audience, and to celebrate our determination for an exciting future.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/ssir-presentations-2018/1003/thumbnail.jp

Tailored digital behaviour change intervention with e-referral system to increase attendance at NHS Stop Smoking Services (The MyWay Project):study protocol for a randomised controlled feasibility trial.

Introduction: In the UK, smokers who use Stop Smoking Services (SSS) are four times more likely to stop smoking than smokers who do not. Attendance has declined, warranting the development of interventions to address this. StopAppTM is a novel, brief online behaviour change intervention designed to address common barriers to SSS attendance. It links to widely commissioned service management software which enables instant appointment booking at a user’s location and time of choice.Methods and analysis: A two-arm parallel group individual participant randomised feasibility RCT of StopAppTM (intervention) compared with standard promotion of and referral to SSSs (control). The study includes a nested qualitative process evaluation to assess the acceptability of the research processes, with a sub-sample of participants. Smokers aged over 16 years will be recruited via three routes: GP practices, community settings and online. After consenting and the collection of baseline data, participants will be randomised to control or intervention groups. Participants in the intervention group receive a link to StopAppTM and those in the control group receive standard web-based information about the SSS. All participants are told they can book a SSS appointment but are under no obligation to do so. Online follow-up 2 months post randomisation includes data on SSS use and carbon monoxide verified 4 week quit rates. The study aims to recruit 162 smokers. Ethics and dissemination: Ethics approval has been granted by the West Midlands - Edgbaston NHS Research Ethics Committee. The findings will be reported in conferences and peer-reviewed publications; and will be used to design the parameters necessary for a definitive trial to ascertain the effectiveness of StopAppTM at increasing booking and attendance at SSSs compared with existing methods for encouraging uptake.Trial Registration: Research Registry: 3995. Trial Registered 18th April 2018