The Grant Program

Round 1

The 17 PBRNs funded in the first round have completed their projects and published their results in a special supplement of the Annals of Family Medicine.

Prescription for Health: Changing Primary Care Practice to Foster Healthy Behaviors - Annals of Family Medicine July/August 2005 Volume 3, Supplement

This supplement contains project-specific and overarching lessons about the opportunities and challenges of incorporating health behavior change into routine primary care practice including:

1) Development of tools for use within primary care practices and for linking
with community and health care system partners.
2) Novel ideas to help practices redesign and foster the implementation of
innovations.
3) Importance of understanding how the context at the community, health
system, practice and patient levels affects both the design and implementation of effective interventions.
4) New perspectives on the process of health behavior change and how it can
be facilitated in a sustained partnership with patients.
5) Process of conducting research in practice-based networks in the current
healthcare environment.
6) Application of models of practice change and health behavior change within
community practices.

Round 2

In the second round of funding, 10 PBRNs were awarded 24-month grants of $300,000 each. The networks are implementing and evaluating the proposed studies in 99 primary care practices. The goal of this round is to understand and measure the extent to which more comprehensive strategies are effective in improving patients’ health behaviors and result in improved practice.

Interventions will field-test new models of care, new tools, and strategies that have potential to facilitate the delivery of health behavior change interventions or to improve their efficiency and reach, and are compatible with existing evidence, such as the interventions disseminated by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and the CDC Community Guide Task Force.

Examples of current projects include:

 PDA-based assessment of health risks for adolescents with tailored in-office counseling, and follow up through community referrals and web-based resources

 Creation of new types of staff positions, such as a community health educator and referral liaison who will serve as a bridge between the practice, patient, and community in the form of a one-stop-shopping health behavior referral service

 Interactive voice response system used to conduct risk assessment and deliver tailored counseling over the phone

 Electronic health record prompts for providers with different options for counseling and follow up incuding web-based, telephone-based, and group visits

 Reframing the 2-year old well-child visit to focus on family lifestyle risk assessment and behavior change for the entire family through referrals to lifestyle counselors

Common Measures

Because a major goal of Prescription for Health is to measure the extent to which comprehensive strategies are effective in changing patient behavior and quality of life relative to the four target health-risk behaviors, the use of the following common set of measures is recommended.

Complete references for these recommended measures, exact items, selection criteria and rationale for their use are described in the following methods paper.

Glasgow RE, Ory MG, Klesges LM, Cifuentes M, Fernald DH, Green LA. Practical and Relevant Self-Report Measures of Patient Health Behaviors for Primary Care Research. Ann Fam Med 2005; 3:73-81

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