Update
APCRF Newsletter Update April 2024
The HRSA-funded ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship (APCRF) proudly announces that effective June 1, 2024, Amy Huebschmann, MD, MS, FACP, FSBM will take over the Fellowship Program Director role from our current Director, Allison Kempe, MD, MPH, who has begun a phased retirement. Dr. Huebschmann is a highly qualified researcher, talented clinician scientist and superb mentor, and Drs. Kempe and Huebschmann have a long history of working together. Dr. Huebschmann is also a subject expert in Dissemination and Implementation science, which is crucial to our fellows’ program training. Further, as the grant will complete its third of five years of funding from HRSA at the end of the current fiscal year, Dr. Kempe felt that this role transition would afford Dr. Huebschmann ample time to demonstrate effective leadership to HRSA before the Fellowship reapplies for another five years of funding to begin in July of 2026. Dr. Kempe will remain on the APCRF as one of our Co-Directors.
Dr. Amy Huebschmann has been approved for promotion to Full Professor effective July 1, 2024, within the Department of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine. She also serves as a senior physician-scientist investigator within ACCORDS and the Ludeman Family Center for Women’s Health Research. As a primary care physician and scientist, Dr. Huebschmann’s career objective is to improve health by leveraging Dissemination and Implementation science methods to tailor evidence-based interventions to real-world settings with attention to health equity. To accomplish this objective, she has focused on interventions that promote patient education and individual behavior change to better manage or prevent chronic disease. Dr. Huebschmann has in-depth knowledge and experience implementing these types of programs in clinical care and community settings in such diverse content areas as physical activity coaching for type 2 diabetes mellitus, overcoming clinical inertia for hypertension management, and implementing effective school-based asthma management programs in communities with high poverty rates. Training and mentoring scientists is also a major career goal for Dr. Huebschmann, as evidenced by her teaching and mentoring record, including her Co-Director roles on both the APCRF and the previously NHLBI-funded K12 Dissemination and Implementation Science Training Program. In addition, in 2019, Dr. Huebschmann founded the University of Colorado Graduate Certificate in Implementation Science to train the next generation of scholars in implementation science methods.
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Amy Huebschmann on her new role as the Program Director of the ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship! It has been an honor for Dr. Kempe to serve in this role on the Fellowship for the past three years, and she and the Fellowship’s other Co-Directors are confident and excited about Dr. Huebschmann taking the helm this coming June.
APCRF Newsletter Update January 2024
The ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship (APCRF), funded with a HRSA Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Institutional Research Training Grant, is a collaborative training program between the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and affiliated institutions Kaiser Permanente of Colorado and Denver Health. The goal of the Fellowship is to train post-doctoral professionals to become primary care research leaders addressing the nation’s primary care health delivery challenges. Toward the end of the summer, we recruited our fourth and final cohort on the five-year grant. We are proud and pleased to introduce our two new fellows who will start the program in July of 2024:
Josh Cockroft, MD, is boarded in both family medicine and psychiatry and has a strong interest in health services and implementation science research. He grew up in Colorado before attending college in the Philadelphia area, medical school at Vanderbilt University, and will complete his combined FM/Psychiatry residency at the University of Cincinnati before the starting as an ACCORDS Primary Care Fellow. His research background includes psychometric instrument validation, examining the role of trust in healthcare for women with a history of substance use disorders, implementation evaluation of a remote behavioral health training in a global health setting, and evaluation of novel models in and technology used for behavioral health consultation in an inpatient setting. His longer-term research interest is focused on the optimization of primary and preventive care delivery for individuals with severe mental illness and reduction of health disparities in this population.
Emily Dunston, MS, will complete her PhD in Health and Kinesiology at the University of Utah with a graduate certificate in Gerontology before beginning the ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship this summer. Emily’s doctoral training focused on exercise across the cancer care continuum, particularly among older adults with cancer. Her current research interests are centered around the delivery of physical activity programs for people living with cancer and other chronic diseases in the primary care setting. Through the ACCORDS primary care research fellowship, she aims to gain expertise in dissemination and implementation science methodologies and to explore the integration of physical activity interventions into clinical healthcare settings.
Congratulations to Drs. Josh Cockroft and Emily Dunston!
HRSA has informed us that they expect us to be able to reapply for another five years of funding in 2025. If refunded, we intend to do our next round of recruitment for another two to three fellows in the summer of 2026. To learn more about the program, please visit our website HERE and please share within your professional network. If you or a colleague of yours would be interested in applying for a future cohort, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the APCRF program manager (Rebecca Speer, MA) with any questions or to express interest in being notified if we are able to secure an additional five years of funding: Rebecca.Speer@cuanschutz.edu
APCRF Newsletter Update October 2023
The ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship (APCRF), funded with a HRSA Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Institutional Research Training Grant, is a collaborative training program between the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus (CU-AMC) and affiliated institutions Kaiser Permanente of Colorado (KPCO) and Denver Health (DH). The goal of the Fellowship is to train post-doctoral professionals to become primary care research leaders addressing the nation’s primary care health delivery challenges.
The fellowship onboarded its first cohort late August of 2021, and proudly announces our first graduate from the program, Andrea Jimenez-Zambrano, PhD, MPH, who finished fellowship on June 30th, 2023. She finished fellowship two months early to be a Methodologist within the Mixed-methods and Qualitative Core at ACCORDS and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics. She had quite a productive fellowship experience, obtaining a Certificate in Dissemination and Implementation Science and conducting a research project that involved interviews with the parents of asthmatic children living in rural Colorado. Specifically, her research project’s goal aimed to understand in-depth which barriers and facilitators might influence Latinx family’s engagement with the Col-SBAP program for improving asthma management and behaviors and identify possible adaptations to the program to ensure accessibility, acceptability and cultural responsiveness that would support Latinx family engagement. During her 22 months in fellowship, she published seven manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals and had eight conference presentations on research work collaborations. Her primary research interest is addressing health inequities in primary care through research that enhances the health and well-being of Spanish-speaking populations.
Over the summer, the fellowship also onboarded its third cohort. We are proud and pleased to introduce our two new fellows who started the program in July whom we introduce below:
David Higgins, MD, MPH, MS is a pediatrician, preventive medicine physician, and physician-researcher. His experience as a community pediatrician led him into population health research at the Colorado School of Public Health where he completed a second residency in Public Health and Preventive Medicine. His research focuses on improving vaccine delivery and confidence in the primary care setting. Through the ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship, he aims to further develop skills in delivery science, community-based participatory research, and pragmatic clinical trials to reduce the burden of vaccine-preventable diseases and improve the health of children, adolescents, and their communities.
Michael Mattiucci, MD, MPH is an instructor fellow in the department of Pediatrics and a primary care pediatrician at the Child Health Clinic in Aurora, CO. He grew up in Rochester, NY and attended medical school at the University of Rochester before moving to Colorado for pediatric residency at the University of Colorado. As an ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellow, he will focus on studying interventions to improve social determinants of health in clinical and community settings, and improving community engagement in primary care delivery and health services research.
Congratulations to Drs. Andrea Jimenez-Zambrano, David Higgins and Michael Mattiucci!
To learn more about the program, please visit our website HERE and/or don’t hesitate to reach out to the APCRF program manager (Rebecca Speer, MA) with any questions: Rebecca.Speer@cuanschutz.edu
APCRF Newsletter Update for September of 2022
The ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship (APCRF), funded with a HRSA Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Institutional Research Training Grant from July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2026, is a collaborative training program between the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus (CU-AMC) and affiliated institutions Kaiser Permanente of Colorado (KPCO) and Denver Health (DH). The goal of the Fellowship is to train post-doctoral professionals to become primary care research leaders addressing the nation’s primary care health delivery challenges.
Since we received notice of being funded in June of last year, the fellowship’s faculty and staff have been quite busy and productive with our recruitment efforts over that time. We now have four trainees total participating in the program: two first year fellows (Hannah Friedman, MD and James [Kyle] Haws, PhD) who in July of this year joined our now second year scholars (Elena Broaddus, PhD and Andrea Jimenez-Zambrano, PhD, MPH). While onboarding and orienting our new trainees over the summer, we were also able to recruit and offer two additional positions to two MD candidates who will begin fellowship in July of next year. Needless to say, it’s been a hectic 15 months and we are very proud of the quality and potential of the trainees we have recruited to date and all that our team has accomplished in our first year alone!
In particular, we’d like to highlight what our two second years, Drs. Broaddus and Jimenez-Zambrano accomplished during their first ten months in the program. These two outstanding fellows were able to collectively publish 11 articles in peer-reviewed journals, two of which were first-author manuscripts. In addition, they collectively gave 7 presentations at national conferences.
Both fellows also made substantial headway on the primary research projects. Dr. Broaddus’ project examines factors predicting interest in assistance with health-related social needs (HRSN) among western Colorado primary care patients, in light of the fact that many patients decline assistance with HSRN and the reasons are not well understood. She is also developing a second research project that examines care adjustments for patients with diabetes and HRSN through an implementation science lens that seeks to clarify which specific domains of disease management should be adjusted and how to ensure that adjustment does not inadvertently increase disparities in care and outcomes. Dr. Jimenez-Zambrano’s primary project explores factors to tailor the Col-SBAP program, which focuses on improving asthma management skills and behaviors, reducing emergency department visits, and decreasing the number of missed school days among low-income and racial/ethnic minority students, as well as addressing social determinants of health as major drivers of asthma disparities. As this program scales out to different geopolitical areas in Colorado, her project homes in specifically on the program’s tailoring for acceptability and cultural responsiveness of Latinx families living in rural and smaller metropolitan areas of the state.
Congratulations to Drs. Elena Broaddus and Andrea Jimenez-Zambrano
on all your success in the first year of the APCRF; you make us proud!
To learn more about the APCRF program, please visit our website HERE. If you or a colleague of yours would be interested in applying, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the APCRF program manager (Rebecca Speer, MA) with any questions about the fellowship prior to our recruitment efforts commencing again this spring: Rebecca.Speer@cuanschutz.edu