Congratulations Misty!

Congratulations to Misty Harris on the successful completion of her Capstone Project, "Health Risk Assessment Use in Primary Care: Measuring Providers' Knowledge, Perceptions and Intentions to Use"  in the Master's in Public Health Program at CWRU!

The abstract of her project is pasted below.

Abstract

Objectives: Recent guidelines introduced by the Affordable Care Act for the Medicare Annual Wellness Visit specify the use of a health risk assessment (HRA). Benefits of employer- or insurance-based HRAs are known but limited scholarship has addressed healthcare-based HRAs. The objective of this study was to measure primary care provider’s perceptions and acceptance of using HRAs in patient care.

Methods: Provider survey scales were authored from theory driven model constructs and distributed to primary care providers first in an academic, safety-net medical center and then through a local practice-based research network. 

Results: 113 primary care providers responded. Only 53.3% had ever even heard or read about a HRA and just 24.3% had asked a patient to use one, but over half were interested in using one with patients.

Conclusions: There is low knowledge and use of HRAs by this group of providers despite inclusion of the tool in the ACA and proposed benefits to patients and providers, none of which can be realized if providers do not know about or are unwilling or unable to use health risk assessments in primary care practice.

 

Congratulations Xiangcao!

Congratulations to Xiangcao Liu on the successful defense of his Master's Project, "HRA: Health Risk Assessment System" in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science!

Abstract

HRA Health Risk Assessment System

by

Xiangcao Liu

A health risk Assessment system is an important tool for helping people realize what lifestyle changes they should have and what benefits they can have by doing things the right way in order to live healthier and longer.  In this thesis, we discuss various components of a health risk assessment system, called the HRA system, which is being developed by a multi-institutional team of researchers from The MetroHealth System, Case Western Reserve University, and other institutions. 

The HRA system takes the questionnaire answers of the user, and produces multiple visualized reports with messages, pictures and bar charts over a range of calculated statistics about the participant’s health status, that highlight potential death risks to the user. The questions in the questionnaire include basic demographic information, epidemiologic data, and life-style information. Health providers can use this tool to communicate with patients on their health status, and individual users can use it to stay aware of their health situation, and, thus, take early measures to deal with risks in their lifestyles. 

This project has fully revamped the midlife HRA calculation library from a previous version, implemented a risk computation library for the older adult HRA (twenty minute version and comprehensive version), and developed a visualization library for HRA report rendering.