A University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) research team is poised to make a real-world impact on vulnerable cancer patients, thanks to new support from the State of Tennessee.
Led by David Schwartz, MD, chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology in the College of Medicine, and founding director of the UTHSC Center for Health Equity, the team received $2.75 million from the Tennessee Department of Health for a project that marries an automated informatics strategy with a personalized patient-support system to tackle interruptions to radiotherapy in at-risk patients. Altha Stewart, MD, senior associate dean for Community Health Engagement at UTHSC and associate professor and chief of Social/Community Psychiatry, is a co-investigator. Arash Shaban-Nejad, PhD, associate professor in the UTHSC-OAK-Ridge National Lab (ORNL) Center for Biomedical Informatics and Department of Pediatrics in the College of Medicine, is a co-multi-principal investigator. Fridtjof Thomas, PhD, professor of Preventive Medicine in the College of Medicine, and Laura Thomas, PhD, associate professor of Psychiatry in the College of Medicine, are co-investigators.
The grant is part of the first round of funding released from the Tennessee Department of Health’s Healthcare Resiliency Program. The program, announced in November 2022, awards competitive grants in two categories – Capital Investment, and Practice Transformation and Extension (PT&E). Dr. Schwartz’s project answers the PT&E category, whose purpose is to encourage innovations in the delivery of health and healthcare services that foster improved health outcomes.
Read more at our UTHSC news site.