Andrea Gilmore-Bykovskyi, PhD, RN, Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing and a recent recipient of an ICTR Collaborative Health Equity Research (CHER) Pilot Award, has received a Paul B. Beeson Emerging Leaders Career Development Award in Aging (K76) from the National Institute on Aging (NIA).
Gilmore-Bykovskyi’s project, Novel Approaches to Identifying and Engaging Disadvantaged Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease in Clinical Research, focuses on improving access and engagement in Alzheimer’s Disease research among individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds, such as racial and ethnic minorities and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
Although individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds are at significantly greater risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease, they are disproportionately underrepresented in research. The proposed study will validate and trial Alzheimer’s screening and recruitment approaches tailored within acute care environments, which are underutilized in standard research recruitment strategies. The project will also support validation of electronic health record screening tools for Alzheimer’s and the specification of these tools for different populations.
Dorothy Edwards, Director of the UW Collaborative Center for Health Equity, notes,
Our team was delighted to learn more about Andrea’s fantastic community-engaged research efforts when she participated as a HELI 2018 Scholar. She has just accepted our invitation to join the inaugural cohort of CCHE Health Equity Research Fellows along with five other exceptional Fellows. Her work explores best practices in recruiting underserved populations into clinical trials using a combination of modern health informatics tools and tailored recruitment strategies. This is very important and timely work targeted to address persistent health disparities among diverse and underserved memebers of Wisconsin communities.
The Beeson award program is a collaboration between the NIA, the John A. Hartford Foundation, and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).