Category Archives: Featured

Shari Bolen, MD, MPH, a faculty member in the Center for Health Care Research and Policy and Associate Professor of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, will serve on the National Clinical Care Commission for the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). Dr. Bolen will represent primary care clinicians on the committee, and will serve as one of 12 selected non-federal committee members.

The Secretary of the DHHS is required to establish this committee to evaluate and make recommendations regarding improving the coordination and leveraging of programs within DHHS and other federal agencies related to clinical care of adults on insulin. The Commission’s work will contribute to the development of federal programs to improve diabetes care within our patient populations. The Secretary and congress must have an operational plan made on the committee recommendations within 90 days of the first meeting.

An article co-authored by Eileen Seeholzer, MD, has been selected for the inaugural edition of “The Best of Health Promotion Practice.” The article focuses on a study conducted by Dr. Seeholzer and other medical professionals on how primary care residency programs are preparing physicians to counsel patients about obesity, nutrition and physical activity (ONPA). The study identified widespread expectations that primary care physicians should counsel their overweight and obese patients, but few residency programs provide the training to support such counseling. MetroHealth’s OB/GYN, Family Medicine and Internal Medicine residency program participated in the study.

To read the article, click here.

Thomas E. Love, PhD, Director Biostatistics and Evaluation at the Center for Health Care Research and Policy, as well as Professor of Medicine, and Population & Quantitative Health Sciences at Case Western Reserve University, and Chief Data Scientist for Better Health Partnership, is a 2018 recipient of The John S. Diekhoff Award for teaching. This prestigious award is presented to full-time faculty making exemplary contributions to the education and development of graduate students at CWRU. Congratulations Dr. Love!

Read more at the Case Daily article

Ashwini Sehgal, MD, and Douglas Gunzler, PhD, were awarded a $3.3 million NIH R01 grant to study depression among patients receiving kidney dialysis. Many dialysis patients have depression that is difficult to diagnose and treat due in part to the overlap between depressive symptoms (e.g. appetite change, trouble sleeping, feeling tired) and symptoms related to kidney dialysis treatment (e.g. nausea, nocturnal cramps, feeling washed out after treatment). The goal of this project is to develop a screening instrument to improve diagnosis and to test the value of weekly directly observed antidepressant treatment in managing depression. Innovative features of the proposed project include the use of advanced statistical techniques to address overlap, administration of a long-acting weekly antidepressant, directly observed treatment, and a rigorous randomized controlled trial design. Dr. Sehgal is the Duncan Neuhauser Professor of Community Health Improvement and Professor of Medicine, Bioethics and Population and Quantitative Health Services. Dr. Gunzler is Assistant Professor of Medicine and Population and Quantitative Health Sciences.

James O’Malley, PhD is Professor of Biostatistics at The Dartmouth Institute and the Department of Biomedical Data Science at the Geisel School of Medicine. He will be giving his main talk from 9:00-10:30 AM on Friday April 20 at the Center for Health Care Research and Policy at MetroHealth Medical Center, entitled “A précis of key types of social network analyses and recent applications involving physician networks” (PDF of slides | PDF article on social network methods).

We will also hold a workshop session over lunch from 12-1 on Friday April 20 in Rammelkamp R219 at Metro (view PDF), where interested faculty, staff and students can hear more about some of James’ work in comparative effectiveness research, health services research and other areas, and talk about some of their own work.

James’ methodological interests encompass statistical inference for social networks, comparative effectiveness research including causal inference for both randomized and observational studies, Bayesian statistics, and multivariate hierarchical models. His subject matter research interests include the relationship between health and social networks, evaluation/estimation of variations in health quality and outcomes, vascular surgery, cardiology, shared decision making and risk communication with patients, and evaluation of medical devices. Specific research projects are typically motivated by problems encountered in his collaborative work with physicians, sociologists, health economists, health services researchers, epidemiologists and others.

James is the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his research and service to the academic community, including the Mid-Career Excellence Award from the American Statistical Association’s Health Policy Statistics Section.