The UAMS Translational Research Institute and the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (UAF) on Wednesday announced a research pilot program that targets telehealth. The one-year pilot awards are up to $15,000, with an additional $5,000 for projects that include a UAF collaborator. Letters of Intent are due by 5 p.m., July 7, 2014.

Download the Request for Applications.

Telehealth uses two-way interactive video and imaging devices to deliver specialized medical services, from emergency stroke treatment to the care of premature infants. Arkansas ranks second nationally in telehealth availability, and it has the lowest ratio of rural residents to telehealth sites, according to the National Telehealth Resource Centers Report.

UAMS has more than 40 pioneering clinical telehealth programs that utilize the state’s infrastructure, but many of the programs lack the data needed to promote broader adoption, said Laura James, M.D., director of the UAMS Translational Research Institute.

“We’re excited to offer this targeted pilot program because we believe Arkansas has the capacity to develop rigorously tested, novel models of health care delivery through telehealth,” James said. “We hope that these pilot grants will become the catalyst for larger, multi-institutional studies.”

The one-year Translational Research Institute Pilot Research Awards will fund as many as four telehealth projects. The institutions’ leaders said the collaborative funding initiative is designed to foster research between physicians engaged in telehealth programs and researchers.

“We expect to see research that tests the clinical outcomes, cost effectiveness and comparative effectiveness of these programs so that they can be more broadly adopted to meet the health care needs of Arkansans,” said Cynthia L. Sagers, Ph.D., associate vice provost for Research and Economic Development at UAF. “Collaborations between UAMS and UAF enhance our research capacity, our reputation and our service to the state.”

Every county in Arkansas has at least one telehealth site and most counties have several. All UAMS Regional Centers, most of the state’s hospitals, Federally Qualified Health Centers, and county health departments are linked through telehealth. Arkansas has 945 telehealth endpoints, 421 anchor health care institutions, and 495 interactive video units.

The UAMS Translational Research Institute’s mission is to help accelerate research that will improve the health and health care of people in Arkansas and across the country. TRI is one of 62 recipients of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA).

Are you interested in participating in TRI’s telehealth-focused pilot awards program (Letter of Intent due July 7, 2014)? The UAMS Center for Distance Health research team can help with your telehealth research by:

Providing expertise on technical requirements and existing resources for your telehealth idea
Connecting you with other telehealth researchers and experts to discuss their telehealth programs
Collaborating to disseminate findings to the scientific community through presentations and publications
Contact telemedicine@uams.edu with questions.

Download the Request for Applications for the TRI telehealth-focused pilot awards program.

Nancy Rusch, Ph.D., has been named director of the Translational Research Institute’s (TRI) Education & Career Development Program. Rusch chairs the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the College of Medicine. Rusch has mentored medical and graduate students, research and clinical fellows, and junior faculty for more than 25 years, and received several mentoring and teaching awards at UAMS. Graduate School Dean Bobby McGehee, Ph.D., will assist Rusch.

Mary Aitken, M.D., M.P.H., has been named director of TRI’s KL2 Career Development Awards Program. Aitken is a professor in the Department of Pediatrics and director of the Center for Applied Research and Evaluation. Jonathan Dranoff, M.D., chief of the Division of Gastroenterology, will assist with the KL2 program. Aitken and Dranoff, both clinician scientists, will work together to further develop the KL2 program, which seeks to support the career development of promising clinical and basic translational researchers across UAMS.

The Translational Research Institute is offering assistance to researchers through a series of TRI Research Forums. The forums, which will include a panel of research experts, are designed to help those who may have a good research idea but aren’t sure how to proceed and those who may need assistance with grant applications. For more information and to request a forum, email TRIServices@uams.edu or call Amy Jo Jenkins, 501-686-5939.

TRI Research Forums will convene twice monthly. Forum requests must be submitted three weeks prior to the forum date. Those dates are: July 11, 10 a.m. – noon (three-week requirement does not apply to July 11 forum); July 28, 9 – 11 a.m.; Aug. 14, 8:30 – 10:30 a.m.; Aug. 25, 9 – 11 a.m.

View a flyer

This list of funding opportunities was updated June 27 and includes a tab with archived funding opportunities that remain open. It is compiled and updated every two weeks by the Division of Pharmaceutical Evaluation and Policy in the College of Pharmacy.

To help TRI better manage research-related requests and inquiries, the new Translational Research Services Center has its own email address: TRIservices@uams.edu. Overseen by Amy Jo Jenkins, M.S., C.C.R.P., C.C.R.C., C.C.R.A., this email portal will help TRI streamline some of the workflow and ensure that researchers get the help they need when they need it.

As of July 1, the Research Support Center (RSC) was officially integrated into TRI as the Translational Research Services Center, which includes all of the services of the RSC as well as other TRI services (Biostats, Health Data Unit, Clinical Research Services Core, etc.)

For general TRI inquiries not related to resources or services, please continue to use the main TRI email address: TRI@uams.edu.

Lori Frank, Ph.D., program director for Research Integration and Evaluation at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), will provide an overview of the merit review process at PCORI on June 27, 9-10 a.m., in the UAMS Wilson Education Building, Room 114 A/B.

Since its establishment as part of the Affordable Care Act, PCORI has been funding patient-centered comparative effectiveness research. Frank’s presentation will provide an overview of the merit review process at PCORI including PCORI’s unique requirements for patient-centeredness in research and engagement of patients and other health care stakeholders. Examples to illustrate PCORI’s unique funding strategy will be provided from successful applications. In addition PCORI’s recently launched PCORnet, a major research data infrastructure initiative, will be described, including ways in which PCORnet will contribute to learning healthcare systems.

Frank’s current work is focused on bringing the patient perspective to comparative effectiveness research. Prior to joining PCORI she served as senior research leader and executive director of the Center for Health Outcomes Research with MEDTAP International/ United BioSource Corporation, where she managed the scientific and financial performance of the Center. While there she initiated and served as principal investigator of the Cognition Initiative, a multi-sponsor PRO development consortium and has continued in an advisory role for that work, now part of the Critical Path Institute PRO Consortium. Her career has focused on patient-reported outcomes assessment and she has held research and teaching positions with Georgetown University Department of Psychiatry, the National Institute on Aging, Medimmune, LLC, and the Veteran’s Administration. Frank received graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins University and Pennsylvania State University and completed postdoctoral training in health services research with the Veteran’s Administration and University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS).

TRI will host the Translational Science Team Building Meet and Greet on June 12, 4-6 p.m., in the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, 10th floor, Walton Auditorium. This is a great opportunity for all UAMS faculty, including those based at the Arkansas Children’s Research Institute and the VA, who would like to establish new translational research directions or form new collaborations. Bring your 30-second “elevator pitch,” have fun and enjoy some wine.

View a flyer about the event.

TRI’s KL2 Career Development Award recipients from 2009-2013 are (seated l-r) Andrew James and Keneshia Bryant; (standing) Ling Gao, Elvin Price, Anthony Goudie, Joshua Kennedy, Dennis Kuo and Tiffany Haynes. Not pictured, Holly Felix, Brooke Montgomery, and Karen McNiece Redwine.

When UAMS received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) in 2009, leadership moved quickly to invest in promising new researchers.

With the idea of “growing our own” researchers, the UAMS Translational Research Institute (TRI) has offered annual KL2 Career Development Awards, which provide salary support, research funds, and mentored training to junior investigators. Below are brief updates of the research being conducted by TRI’s KL2 recipients:

2009
Holly Felix, Ph.D., M.P.A.
In addition to studying the impact of obesity in long-term care, Holly Felix is getting traction with her evaluation of the Community Connector Program that links Medicaid-eligible, physically disabled adults and the elderly to long-term care services. Her KL2 helped her disseminate earlier findings that the Community Connector Program could save Arkansas’ Medicaid system $2.6 million over three years. Funded by NIH, Felix is studying the program in 15 counties after Medicaid expanded it from three. She is currently pursuing NIH funding to expand her study of obesity in long-term care.

2010
Dennis Kuo, M.D., M.H.S.
Having set out to solve the complex care needs of patients at Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH), Dennis Kuo is thinking big: “You have to redesign the health care system,” he said. Now the principal investigator on two federally funded studies, his data-driven work is helping achieve better understanding of patients’ health needs, family needs, and their health care use patterns. As a result, ACH is developing personal care teams, especially for those with special health care needs, and Kuo was recently tapped to lead the rollout of ACH’s Patient-Centered Medical Home program.

2011
Keneshia Bryant, Ph.D., R.N., F.N.P.-B.C.
Motivated by the patients she saw as a family nurse practitioner, Keneshia Bryant has used her KL2 to better understand the roles of ethnicity, culture and gender on depression. Her research is focused on addressing longstanding mental health barriers in rural African-American communities, including service infrastructure and stigma. She is pursing funding for a faith-based stress management intervention that she developed with the community. Bryant is also co-principal investigator of a federally funded, community-based approach to reducing health disparities and co-investigator on two other mental health studies.

Ling Gao, M.D., Ph.D.
Every Sunday, Ling Gao checks in by phone with her late-stage Merkel cell carcinoma patients. When the dermatologist and researcher recently discussed specific cases, she fought back tears, underscoring her resolve to find treatments for the rare, aggressive skin cancer. With no commercially available cell lines and limited resources, she has personally managed the challenging, daily pursuit of growing cells in her lab. Her reward is now within sight. Using tumor cells derived from her patients, she has identified potential therapeutic targets and will seek to publish her findings this year.

Andrew James, Ph.D.
Using a functional MRI, Andrew James has analyzed the brains of 53 healthy adults, providing a suitable sample size for mapping brain function. The results are most striking in the different ways that healthy people use their brains to accomplish the same mental tasks. His results are being applied to better understand cognitive deficits in a broad range of psychiatric and neurologic illnesses. This foundation is essential to his epilepsy research and has led to new collaborations. He hopes that functional MRIs will one day inform medical decision-making.

Karen McNiece Redwine, M.D., M.P.H.
Searching for ways to more effectively treat children with hypertension – one of the most prevalent chronic diseases in America with significant early morbidity – Karen McNiece Redwine used her KL2 to study the potential benefits of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring. She found that multiple blood pressure readings taken in patients’ natural environments over an extended period resulted in changes to patients’ medication regimen about 40 percent of the time. She presented the findings earlier this month at the Pediatric Academic Society in Vancouver.

2012
Anthony Goudie, Ph.D.
Using national hospital databases, Anthony Goudie is searching for ways to improve hospital quality of care. His KL2 effort is focused on understanding the variation in rates of pediatric hospital-acquired infections such as Clostridium difficile. The challenge of producing apples-to-apples hospital comparisons prompted Goudie to develop a novel risk-adjustment algorithm that has been well received in his field. He has also identified common traits associated with hospitals with low infection rates. He hopes his findings will be used to develop fair incentives to help other pediatric hospitals improve their quality of care.

Tiffany Haynes, Ph.D.
To address mental health disparities in underserved, rural African-Americans, Tiffany Haynes reached out to the strength of the community: Churches. Haynes, a clinical psychologist, has gathered qualitative data from church leaders, other members of the faith community and rural African-Americans to design interventions in which churches can play a key role in decreasing disparities. Haynes is also co-investigator on a Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) grant that is addressing barriers to mental health care in underserved African-American communities.

Brooke EE Montgomery, Ph.D., M.P.H.
While working on an earlier project, Brooke Montgomery, a behavioral scientist, was moved as female survivors of emotional, sexual, and physical violence discussed their subsequent struggles to find safe, healthy relationships with men. Motivated by their stories, she has partner with shelters, treatment facilities, and advocacy and policy groups to design a sexual health intervention program. She is now recruiting women participants who have survived violence, trauma and abuse. Montgomery is also studying how violence against women may impact HIV risk behaviors as part of the national HIV Prevention Trials Network Scholars Program.

2013
Joshua Kennedy, M.D.
As a new KL2 scholar, Joshua Kennedy, an allergy and immunology specialist, is excited to be part of an asthma research team that is conceiving innovative research techniques on a national scale. Using donated living lungs, Kennedy has presented preliminary findings that the airways of asthmatics react differently and perhaps more severely to the common cold than nonasthmatics. He and the team are now trying to tease out the cause of this sometimes fatal phenomenon. Human studies will come next, and Kennedy hopes their work will lead to treatment breakthroughs.

Elvin Price, Pharm.D., Ph.D.
By targeting certain nuclear receptor genes, Elvin Price hopes to someday ensure that individual patients get the safest, most effective medicines for their particular condition. His KL2 has allowed him to focus on genetic associations with blood pressure, lipid and glucose levels. He has identified genes of interest in the lab and then analyzed them in patients. Having completed his first set of analyses of clinical data, Price is seeking to replicate the results in collaboration with the University of Michigan. He is also pursuing studies of treatment-related outcomes over time.

View a chart of the KL2 recipients’ number of publications and grants since their awards.

Editors Note: Sundararaman Swaminathan, M.D., a 2010 recipient, is continuing his diabetes-related research at the University of Virginia, and Wang “Steve” Cheung, M.D., Ph.D., a 2009 recipient, is in private practice in Orlando, Fla.

This list of funding opportunities was updated on May 15 and includes a tab with archived funding opportunities that remain open. It is compiled and updated every two weeks by the Division of Pharmaceutical Evaluation and Policy in the College of Pharmacy.