Along with a team of healthcare researchers from Columbia University,聽, who shares a secondary appointment with the Department of Family Medicine at CU Anschutz鈥檚 School of Medicine, has received an R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).聽This four-year, $2.6 million grant is a collaborative project, headed up by colleagues from Columbia University鈥檚 School of Nursing, Dr. Maxim Topaz and Dr. Jacquelyn Taylor.
The project, funded specifically by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities within the NIH, is entitled: 鈥淚dentifying and Reducing Stigmatizing Language in Home Healthcare: The ENGAGE Study鈥�. The overarching aim is to design and pilot-test a technology-driven system, ENGAGE, that will help to identify and reduce the use of stigmatizing language among home healthcare nurses. As part of the project, the team will be collaborating with two large providers of home healthcare services in the US to collect and analyze millions of nursing notes. Natural language processing techniques will then be implemented to automatically detect and flag stigmatizing language in the clinical notes, and provide feedback to the nurses to improve written language referring to patients.
Research of this sort has already proven hugely valuable in other healthcare settings, where stigmatizing language has been shown to negatively affect patient outcomes on a range of fronts, and where efforts to shift such language practices have resulted in demonstrable improvements on these same fronts. The team is thus excited to push into the context of home healthcare, specifically, to see what improvements might be made in that arena.
Congratulations, Prof. Raymond and team!
