iTHRIV leadership (lt to rt) Jeanny Aragon-Ching, Karen Johnston, Sandra Burks, Kathy Hosig at the CTSA Annual Meeting in Washington D.C.
In early November, members of iTHRIV’s leadership team attended the 2022 Clinical Translational Science Award (CTSA) Program Meeting. UVA’s Karen Johnston MD, MSc and Sandra Burks, RN were joined by their iTHRIV colleagues, Kathy Hosig, PhD MPH of Virginia Tech and Inova’s Jeanny Aragon-Ching, MD, at the annual meeting in Washington DC.
Johnston served on program committee that among other tasks, helped to decide this year’s theme: “Achieving Health Equity through the Science of Translation”. The meeting provided iTHRIV leadership an opportunity to network with their peers, share best practices for practical applications, and gain knowledge through resource updates.
Data Justice Academy intern, Sherilouise Scott-Dixon, proudly displays her team’s research poster.
A highlight for the team was the poster session. Johnston, Aragon-Ching, Hosig, and Burks were proud to support Sherilouise Scott-Dixon as she presented the resultant research project of her data science internship at UVA. Scott-Dixon, a Virginia State University student, collaborated with a team of interns and research mentors through the Data Justice Academy, a UVA School of Data Science summer diversity pathway program focusing on health equity.
Scott-Dixon and her colleagues examined inequities in the allocation of care and treatment in COVID–19 patients. Using data from the NIH-NCATS funded National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) clinical data repository, the team looked at disparities in hospitalization after an emergency department visit, disparities once hospitalized, and disparities in receiving treatment across race/ethnicity and social determinants of health. The team was able to examine care practice data points in over 6 million COVID-19 patients, allowing Scott- Dixon and her colleagues to generate hypotheses about major health equity issues.
Johnston states, “We could not be more excited to see the outstanding work generated by Louise and her team in partnership with iTHRIV and the UVA School of Data Science Data Justice Academy. This type of work has the potential to guide interventions to reduce health inequities in our health care systems across the nation.”