Dr. Brad Doebbeling, chair of the BioHealth Informatics Department at the School of Informatics and Computing, and Professor of Informatics, Medicine and Biomedical Engineering, was the recent recipient of a $2million grant through Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).
PCORI grants are designed to include patients in the discussion of how to improve and expedite medical care. Dr. Doebbeling and his team are the first ever recipients in Indiana.
In the coming months, he and his team will work with community health centers around Indiana on how to provide better health care in a more timely fashion.
“We were funded to form a collaborative of community health centers from around the state of Indiana to gain a better understanding of how we can improve access to health care in Indiana,” said Dr. Doebbeling. “There are many underserved people in Indiana that should be seen, but resources are a challenge, the providers-the space-the time, to see them and get them the care that they need.”
Dr. Doebbeling and his team are partnering with different community health centers around Indiana to study how patients get into the clinic systems and to engage patients, providers and staff in discussions about opportunities for change and important barriers. They are looking to uncover best practices and innovations that the community centers have found that work for them on a physician, staff member, or patient level to improve access to care.
“We’re right at the tipping point in healthcare informatics and health system redesign, where we can effectively organize and use the information and data to make better decisions, enabling us to provide more efficient, higher quality health care,” said Dr. Doebbeling. “I’m excited, now is the time to solve those kind of problems. Our country is embarking on a grand experiment to work within existing insurance plans and delivery systems to expand care to the uninsured. There is tremendous data and info available that we need to utilize to provide better, safer and more efficient and effective health care.” This is exciting to us because it’s a real partnership between patients, providers, staff, health systems, and researchers all working together to solve access to care problems.”
PCORI aims to provide information with the best available evidence to help patients and their health care providers make more informed decisions. The PCORI research is intended to give patients a better understanding of the prevention, treatment and care options available, and the science that supports those options.
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