Recognition November 2018

• Coleman leads safety-net collaborative
• Lewis gives implementations science keynote
• AHA honors Chen for hypertension medication research

Katie Coleman leads 13-state collaborative for creating a stronger safety net

KPWHRI’s Katie Coleman, MSPH, recently served as lead faculty for the Delta Center for a Thriving Safety Net State Learning & Action Collaborative.  This event, held October 15 and 16 in Seattle, gathered grantees from 13 states to begin designing behavioral health and primary care partnerships and to practice storytelling.

The Delta Center for a Thriving Safety Net is a national initiative that aims to create a strengthened ambulatory care safety net that is achieving better care, better health, lower costs, happier staff, and reduced health disparities in a sustainable way.  

“There’s no known right path to shifting to value-based care, but we believe that initiating change across federally qualified health centers and behavioral health centers throughout a state requires that people share a common vision,” said Ms. Coleman. “Achieving that requires getting to know one other and everyone’s respective goals.”

Through the State Learning & Action Collaborative, the Delta Center aims to advance four goals: build internal capacity of state associations, build state association capacity in policy and advocacy, foster collaboration between primary care and behavioral health, and build capacity of state associations to provide technical assistance and training to their members.

Launched in January 2018 with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Delta Center is led by JSI Research & Training Institute, Inc., the Center for Care Innovations, and the MacColl Center for Health Care Innovation at KPWHRI.  Ms. Coleman serves as KPWHRI Delta Center principal investigator.  She is also director of the Learning Health System Program at KPWHRI.

Cara C. Lewis delivers keynote at international summit in Melbourne

Associate Investigator and MacColl Center for Health Care Innovation scientist Cara C. Lewis, PhD, delivered a keynote address on October 22, 2018 at the Global Evidence and Implementation Summit in Melbourne, Australia.

“Optimizing the Impact of Implementation: Lessons Learned from Wolverine Human Services’ Journey” described a five-year implementation project led by Dr. Lewis in conjunction with the Beck Institute and Wolverine Human Services, a network of residential treatment centers housing teens throughout the state of Michigan.“A methodology for generating a tailored implementation blueprint: an exemplar from a youth residential setting” provides more background on this project.

The Global Evidence and Implementation Summit 2018 convened experts from across the world to talk about their experiences in generating and implementing evidence for better policy and practice. It explored the evidence for designing, implementing and reviewing effective programs and policies, and was attended by 700 delegates from 30 countries.

Dr. Lewis is an international leader in implementation science, past president of the Society for Implementation Research Collaboration (SIRC) and co-founding editor-in-chief of the forthcoming SIRC journal. A clinical psychologist, she is also affiliate faculty in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington.

Lu Chen and colleagues win American Heart Association poster award 

KPWHRI Assistant Investigator Lu Chen, PhD, MPH, received an award for at the American Heart Association’s Joint Hypertension 2018 Scientific Sessions in Chicago in September.  The poster focused on Dr. Chen’s recent finding that many women with chronic hypertension stop taking their antihypertensive medications when they become pregnant although the impact of treatment interruption on the health of babies and mothers is unknown. The study, conducted among 5,7782 women in three Kaiser Permanente regions, was also reported in Medscape. Dr. Chen’s collaborators were Drs. Susan Shortreed, Aruna Kamineni, and Sascha Dublin and Rod Walker, KPWHRI; Drs. Thomas Easterling and Victoria Holt, University of Washington; Drs. T. Craig Cheetham and Kristi Reynolds, Kaiser Permanente Southern California; and Dr. Lyndsay Avalos, Kaiser Permanente Northern California.