People & Programs—July 2014

Dr. Ludman helps spread phone psychotherapy in Germany, Switzerland

Research by Group Health Psychiatrist and GHRI Senior Investigator Gregory Simon, MD, MPH, and GHRI Senior Research Associate Evette Ludman, PhD, has shown that phone psychotherapy is an effective and cost-effective treatment for depression. And now their book Creating a Balance – Telephone Counseling Program for Stress and Depression, has been translated into German as part of a stepped-care intervention led by researchers at Hamburg University in Germany and Zürich University in Switzerland. Dr. Ludman also gave an invited seminar at Zürich University May 21, sharing insights from Group Health’s research on phone counseling for mental health problems.

Drs. Larson, Psaty, & Wagner among Thomson Reuters’ top scientific minds

Each year Thomson Reuters names the “world’s most influential scientific minds” based on highly cited papers in 21 categories, including social sciences and clinical medicine. The 2014 list includes three Group Health physician scientists: Eric B. Larson, MD, MPH, GHRI executive director and Group Health vice president for research; Bruce Psaty, MD, PhD, GHRI senior investigator and University of Washington (UW) professor of medicine, epidemiology, and health services; and Ed Wagner, MD, MPH, GHRI senior investigator and emeritus director of GHRI’s MacColl Center for Health Care Innovation. They are among 3,200 researchers who published the most highly cited papers—which rank in the top 1 percent by citations in their field—between 2002 and 2012.

Data analytics & healthy aging: Dr. Larson shares expertise on both

On June 11, Group Health Vice President for Research and GHRI Executive Director Eric B. Larson, MD, MPH, helped kick off America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP)’s 2014 Data Analytics Forum in Seattle. As part of the opening general session, he discussed opportunities and challenges related to using big data to improve health care and make it more efficient. Switching focus to healthy aging, he presented a webinar for the University of California, San Francisco’s Smoking Cessation Leadership Center on June 25—discussing smoking and the risk of developing late-life dementia.

Dr. Dublin answers FDA’s call on studying medication safety in pregnancy

GHRI Associate Investigator Sascha Dublin, MD, PhD, recently travelled to Washington, DC to provide comments at a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) public meeting about how best to study the safety of medication in pregnancy. Dr. Dublin, who helps lead the FDA’s Medications in Pregnancy Risk Evaluation Program (MEPREP), shared brief comments about the potential of electronic health records to identify patients for studies and generate useful research data.