Duke-Durham Partnership: Informatics Improves Health

Although they are still in the planning phase of their interventions, Reese says that one of the goals that the team has is to standardize the messages that patients get from their providers.

"We realize that with lower income folks, you have transient populations," he says. "People will move from provider to provider. But, hopefully, if they are getting the same consistent messaging, it will eventually work well with the intervention and the loss of body mass as a whole."

Like Elliott-Bynum, Reese is impressed at the resources and data that Duke has made available to project team members. "I'm actually overwhelmed by the amount of information that's being made accessible," he says. "Never before has all of this information and all of these technical services been made available to come to a common goal."

The city and its residents have been the focus of many research studies in the past, so they are no strangers to the process, says Reese. The team is gathering information by conducting focus groups with the community to help them determine what barriers they face when it comes to obesity. Reese says they are going to be watchful that the project teams do not ask the same questions and duplicate efforts, which could result in research fatigue.

"With this model, we really want to engage the community in the process," he says. "Everyone gets told what they should do and if that was working, we would have conquered obesity as a whole."

The teams, which began meeting at the end of April, have to work together to determine what sort of changes they wanted to try to accomplish to improve health outcomes. They also have to determine what it is going to cost to make the changes. They have eight months to complete their design work and financial analysis before presenting their plans. Once the planning stage is complete, the teams will put their changes in place to evoke long-term changes in the community.

DHI Project Teams
The DHI includes 10 individual projects aimed at reducing death or disability from specific diseases or disorders prevalent in the community. The projects are as follows:

• Adolescent health
• Asthma
• Cancer
• Heart disease
• Diabetes
• HIV and sexually transmitted diseases
• Maternal health
• Pain management
• Substance abuse
• Seniors' health

Cynthia Johnson is the editor of Medicine On The 'Net, a monthly newsletter from HealthLeaders Media.