The work of Health Policy and Management (HPM) students and staff earned top honors at GW’s Health and Medicine Research Day. The annual event is dedicated to highlighting the breadth of research on issues of major disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and global significance being done at the George Washington University.
Kan Gianattasio received the Milken Institute School of Public Health’s Judges’ Choice Award for a doctoral student, which includes $400, for “Evaluating the Patient-Centered Quality of Cancer Survivorship Care Models,” which describes research she is conducting with Associate Professor Holly Mead. Joy Eckert earned the school’s Policy and Practice Award for “Promotion of New Diabetes Products in the District of Columbia,” research that she and HPM MPH Student Dilipan (Dili) Sundaramoorthy completed with Associate Professor Susan Wood.
“All of our students do excellent work, and Kan, Dili and Joy are truly extraordinary students who have made outstanding contributions to important research being conducted in the HPM department. All three are poised to make a real difference in health policy,” said HPM Professor and Chair Thomas LaVeist.
Gianattasio is working toward her PhD in Health Policy. She did her undergraduate work in economics and global health at Duke University and has worked on the HPM staff as a student senior research assistant for almost two years. Gianattasio created her poster based on the work she is doing with Professor Mead, the principal investigator for the Evaluating Cancer Survivorship Care Models project. Funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), the project involves examining data from patient surveys and focus groups, as well as organizational surveys and interviews, to determine whether and how the quality and outcomes of care provided to cancer survivors differ by care delivery model.
Eckert works full-time in the HPM department as a senior research assistant, where she is the project manager for the AccessRx grant. She is working toward her MPH in Epidemiology. The poster she presented was based on research she and Sundaramoorthy conducted last year with Professor Wood on how pharmaceutical marketing impacts healthcare in DC which focused on diabetes in the District. Wood is contracted by the DC Department of Health to analyze pharmaceutical marketing in DC. Sundaramoorthy is a former HPM student research assistant and now has an internship with the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP).
Both Gianattasio and Eckert are enthusiastic about the research they presented at Research Days because of its implications for health policy. “We found that companies spend most of their marketing dollars for diabetes on newer, more expensive classes of drugs. We predicted that an increase in marketing for these drugs could precede an increase in the number of prescriptions,” Eckert says. In turn, this could contribute to increasing healthcare costs, she explains.
For her part, Gianattasio is hopeful that the department will attract additional funding to evaluate the comparative effectiveness of survivorship care models in delivering high-quality, patient-centered care among underserved patients. She is also looking forward to starting work on her dissertation on Medicare policy and end-of-life care in the fall.