Salt Lake City — HealthInsight, a nonprofit, community-based organization dedicated to improving health and health care, has received a Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to support a project to enhance the integration of family caregivers into the health care of elders in Utah.
This work will be carried out by Christie North, MBA, Creating Quality, and Debra Scammon, PhD, Emma Eccles Jones Professor of Marketing, David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah. The project will focus on developing best practices for integrating family caregivers into the care teams of primary care providers for elderly patients with chronic conditions.
North and Scammon, both family caregivers themselves, want to help reduce the burdens on family caregivers who are relied upon to perform a variety of medical care tasks without adequate training. By partnering together, primary care providers and family caregivers can enhance care for elders, while enhancing the satisfaction of caregivers and providers. Capitalizing upon the synergy of primary care providers and family caregivers working effectively together will help sustain the invaluable contribution that family caregivers make to the care of the elderly by reducing burden and burnout.
“Family caregivers have been under recognized and largely unsupported by the health care system. What they do is difficult and demanding, both logistically and emotionally,” Scammon said. “At some point everyone has been, will be, or will need the assistance of a family caregiver. We need to do everything possible to ensure that those caregivers are supported.”
The project is part of a portfolio of projects approved for PCORI funding to help develop a skilled community of patients and other stakeholders from across the health care enterprise, and to involve them meaningfully in every aspect of PCORI’s work.
“This project was selected for Engagement Award funding not only for its commitment to engaging patients and other stakeholders, but also for its potential to increase the usefulness and trustworthiness of the information we produce and facilitate its dissemination and uptake,” said Jean Slutsky, PCORI’s Chief Engagement and Dissemination Officer. “We look forward to following the project’s progress and working with HealthInsight to share the results.”
The HealthInsight project and the other projects approved for funding by the PCORI Engagement Award Program were selected through a highly competitive review process in which applications were assessed for their ability to meet PCORI’s engagement goals and objectives, as well as program criteria. For more information about PCORI’s funding to support engagement efforts, visit http://www.pcori.org/content/eugene-washington-pcori-engagement-awards/.
About PCORI
PCORI is an independent, non-profit organization authorized by Congress in 2010 to fund comparative effectiveness research that will provide patients, their caregivers, and clinicians with the evidence needed to make better-informed health and healthcare decisions. PCORI is committed to seeking input from a broad range of stakeholders to guide its work.
About HealthInsight
HealthInsight is a private, non-profit, community-based organization dedicated to improving health and health care that is composed of locally governed organizations in three western states: Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. The HealthInsight enterprise holds contracts, grants and accreditation in key areas of health care improvement. HealthInsight is a recognized leader in quality improvement; transparency and public reporting; health information technology programs; healthcare system delivery and payment reform efforts; and human factors science research and application. Visit our website at healthinsight.org.