Page 25 - Christiana Care Focus February 2019

Heather Bittner Fagan, M.D., MPH, associate vice chair for research at Christiana Care’s Department of Family and Community Medicine, said there need not be compromise between effective research and community values.
“We make good science better, more impactful,” said Dr. Bittner Fagan, also the ACCEL lead for community engagement and outreach. “At its heart, any research should have in mind the people whose health it seeks to improve, and involving those people in how you ask questions makes the results more practical and applicable to their lives.”
The first five years of the grant showed that the community’s research priorities — mental health, substance use disorder and social determinants of health round out the top three — don’t
| Research
Representatives of Christiana Care Health System and four partner organizations mark
the renewal of a five-year, $25 million grant to support research advancing medical science and transforming health care delivery.
“Our partnership with DSU gives us the opportunity to diversify our workforce
of researchers,” Dr. Bittner Fagan
said. “By attracting more researchers from traditionally underrepresented communities, we will be able to conduct more useful and insightful research that ultimately will help improve the health of our neighbors.”
During the visit by NIH officials, Dominique Medaglio, Pharm.D., MS, a senior clinical researcher at the Value Institute, presented her work on medication adherence.
Though most existing research focuses on whether patients take their medication, she used pharmacy claims data to investigate how many patients were filling their prescriptions in the first place.
She found 39 percent of people discharged after a cardiovascular event did not fill at least one of their discharge prescriptions
ODominique Medaglio, and about 10 percent didn’t fill any. Pharm.D., MS
ver the next five years, ACCEL’s major goals include gaining insight from large data sets through the development of a Medicare data analysis center, finding new ways to share data between institutions
and mentoring clinical researchers to help them find success, said Value Institute Corporate Director Mia Papas, Ph.D., M.S., the site principal investigator for ACCEL.
“We are looking forward to more funded research projects, more connections across ACCEL institutions and, most importantly, improved health outcomes for the community,” she said. 
Learn more about ACCEL at www.de-ctr.org.
Heather Bittner Fagan, M.D., MPH
always align with those of clinicians. The addition of Delaware State University,
a historically black public university in Dover, to the collaborative is expected
to bring new expertise in community outreach.
Its location in Kent County will help the collaborative reach further across Delaware.
“
At its heart, any research should have in mind the people whose health it seeks to improve, and involving
those people in how you ask questions makes the results more practical and applicable to their lives. Heather Bittner”Fagan, M.D., MPH
FOCUS • FEBRUARY 2019 23