Healthy Measures Newsletter of the Department of Medical Social Sciences Innovating & Applying Social Science Methodologies to Improve Health Fall, 2011
|
|
About Us...
Established in March, 2009, the Department of Medical Social Sciences provides a unique scientific home for applied researchers who integrate biomedical and social science approaches to improve health and health care delivery across the lifespan.
Click on this image to learn more about our Scientific Themes on our website.
| |
|
|
|
New Grant Awards
Symptom Monitoring and Reporting System for Chronic Illness in Pediatric Populations
PI: Jin-Shei Lai, PhD
Proposed work will build the Symptom Monitoring and Reporting System in Pediatric Populations (SyMon-Peds), using oncology as a starting point.
PROMIS Pain Supplement to the original PROMIS project
PI: David Cella, PhD
Supplemental funding is to provide analytic support to expand the adult pain quality item pool, and to analyze data on additional adult and pediatric pain banks.
PROsetta Stone
PI: David Cella, PhD
Addresses two barriers to including patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in comparative effectiveness research (CER): lack of standardization of PRO scores to aid in their interpretation, and lack of feasibility of incorporating PROs in CER.
iAdapt: A low literacy multimedia approach to disseminate bilingual diabetes CERSGs
PI: Elizabeth Hahn, MA
Improving the acessibility of comparative effectiveness research findings for underserved populations.
| |
| Honors and Awards |
Brian Mustanski, PhD, received the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution for 2011 by the Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues, a division of the American Psychological Association.
Lynne Wagner, PhD received the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG), Research and Education Foundation Young Investigator Award.Karen Kaiser, PhD was accepted as a member of the Robert H. Lurie Cancer Center of Northwestern University in March, 2011.
|
| Welcome New Faculty |
Gayle R. Byck, PhD, Research Assistant Professor
Karon F. Cook, PhD, Research Associate Professor
George J. Greene, PhD, Research Assistant Professor
Sally Jensen, PhD, Research Assistant Professor
Brian Mustanski, PhD, Associate Professor, Director of IMPACT LGBT Health and Development Program
Timothy Pearman, PhD, Associate Professor, Program Director -Supportive Oncology
Elizabeth Sweet, PhD, Assistant Professor
Secondary Faculty Appointments
Melissa A. Simon, MD, Assistant Professor in Obstetrics and Gynecology-General / Preventive Medicine
Craig Garfield, MD, MAPP, Assistant Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Feinberg School of Medicine
Justin Starren, MD, PhD, Division of Preventive Medicine-Health and Biomedical Informatics
|
|
NIH Toolbox Project enters new phase
|  Developers of the NIH Toolbox for the Assessment of Neurological and Behavioral Function (NIH Toolbox) led by Richard Gershon, PhD, as P.I., reached an important milestone in their effort to build a set of brief but comprehensive tests for use in large-scale studies. After an exhaustive evaluation of nearly 1,400 existing tests, they developed 47 tools that effectively measure motor, cognitive, sensory and emotional function. The NIH Toolbox project now moves to the next stage of development: establishing normative data for these tests in a sampling of the general population. "We are well on our way to providing the NIH Toolbox of cost-effective and easy-to-administer instruments to use when measuring the cognitive and emotional health of people aged 3 to 85 involved in large-scale studies," Gershon said. NIH Toolbox project highlights - There is little uniformity among measures used to assess quality of life in patients with neurological disease, making it difficult to compare or compile data across studies.
- The NIH Toolbox will be a comprehensive set of measures for assessing cognition, emotion, sensation and motor functions, with an emphasis on those measures useful for studying epidemiology, prevention and long-term intervention.
- Investigators are establishing normative data for the 47 tools in the NIH Toolbox, by testing them in people from age 3 to 85. During the norming stage, the instruments will be tested on children and adults, in both English speakers and Spanish speakers.
- The entire NIH Toolbox will take only two hours to administer but will measure a wide range of function, from working memory to perceived stress to physical strength. Primarily administered using a laptop, some tests will require additional off-the shelf equipment.
- While the NIH Toolbox measures are being normed for American study participants, the instruments will be made available to the worldwide research community conducting longitudinal, epidemiological, and prevention or intervention trials.
"The entire range of NIH Toolbox instruments, scoring algorithms and norms will be available on-line. Additionally, we designed it to be flexible enough to adapt over time to changes in science and technology", Gershon said.
To learn more about the NIH Toolbox and to comment on the project, go to http://www.nihtoolbox.org. |
|
|
|
|
| Recent & Upcoming Events | |
October 5, 2011
International Conference on Health Policy Statistics, Item Response Theory, Computerized Adaptive Testing. Karon Cook, PhD, Nan Rothrock, PhD
October 26-29, 2011
International Society for Quality of Life Research,
Introduction to PROMIS and Assessment Center Nan Rothrock, PhD, Richard Gershon, PhD
-Evaluation of Dimensionality and Model Fitting for IRT Analysis. Seung Choi, PhD, David Cella, PhD
See full list of events>>
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
