HHS Awards $14M to Study Racial, Ethnic Group Interventions

More than $14.2 million will be used to develop, implement, and test strategies to improve the adoption and dissemination of interventions obtained from patient-centered outcomes research among racial and ethnic minority populations, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Assistant Secretary for Health Howard Koh, MD, MPH, announced Wednesday.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant awards, made under its Comparative Effectiveness Research for Eliminating Disparities (CERED) program, will focus on issues such as breast and prostate cancer in underserved populations, cardio?metabolic issues in Native American and Pacific people, and health disparities in Harlem, NY.

NIH, with its National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), awarded grants to centers of excellence at the following universities and medical schools: University of Alabama, Birmingham; University of South Florida, Tampa; University of Hawaii at Manoa; University of Illinois at Chicago; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; Mount Sinai School of Medicine of New York University; Columbia University Health Sciences, New York; and University of Puerto Rico, Medical Sciences, San Juan.

HHS' Office of Minority Health (OMH) also awarded nearly $2 million to Westat. This project will designate diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease (including stroke and hypertension), and arthritis as the primary health conditions for which appropriate interventions can be identified from comparative effectiveness research. Among the populations to be examined are African-Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, and urban American Indians/Alaska Natives.

NIMHD and OMH will jointly evaluate the scientific progress of the recipients of the grant awards following standard NIH policies and procedures.