eHealth researcher Tiffany Veinot seminar

Speaker              

Tiffany C. Veinot, MLS, PhD

Title                     

Leveling Up: Developing Upstream Health Informatics Interventions to Reduce Health Disparities

Abstract

Health disparities are differences in disease incidence, prevalence, morbidity, mortality, or survival in one group compared to the general population. Health disparities are a product of macro-level social, political and economic mechanisms and intermediary social determinants of health such as living and working conditions and social networks. This presentation makes the case for “upstream” informatics interventions that focus on the social, political, economic and physical contexts in which health is produced. The presentation outlines key findings from three community-based research projects focused on developing and evaluating upstream informatics interventions. The first leverages social media to assess the food environment in socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods, and will ultimately result in a decision support tool for public health officials, urban planners, policy makers and nonprofit organizations. The second focuses on stigma reduction in social networks to enhance the uptake of HIV testing among men who have sex with men. The result will be a blended online/offline intervention leveraging social networks. The third aims to reduce hemodialysis complications disproportionately experienced by women. The cluster-randomized, pragmatic trial compares the effectiveness of technology-mediated behavioral interventions for healthcare providers (tablet-based diagnostic checklist and team training) and for patients (tablet-based education and peer mentoring). The presentation concludes with recommendations for researchers and practitioners who aspire to enhance health equity with informatics.

Bio

Tiffany C. Veinot, MLS, PhD is an associate professor (with tenure) at the Schools of Information and Public Health and Director of the Master of Health Informatics Program at the University of Michigan. She is the Principal Investigator of a $7.2 million, 5-year study funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, “Enhancing the Cardiovascular Safety of Hemodialysis Care: A Cluster-randomized, Comparative Effectiveness Trial of Multimodal Provider Education and Patient Activation Interventions (Dialysafe).” She has also held or co-held grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Veterans Affairs, Institute of Museum and Library Services and several Canadian funders. Her published research has garnered seven publication awards from conferences, journals and professional associations in the fields of health informatics, information science, and human-computer interaction. She is on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), International Journal of Medical Informatics and the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). She has served on the program committees for the American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium and the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing. She is also guest editor on an upcoming special focus issue of JAMIA entitled, “Health Informatics and Health Equity: Improving Our Reach and Impact.”