On May 4, 2023, Meghan McGurk and Dr. Catherine Pirkle presented about the Office of Public Health Studies’ Healthy Hawai‘i Evaluation Team’s (HHET) collaborations with the Hawai‘i State Department of Health Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion Division (HDOH CDPHPD) at the “Collaborations Across the Health Sciences: Lighting Talk” event. The University of Hawaii at Mānoa Provost, Michael Bruno, put together this event with the help of the Health Sciences Steering Committee to identify opportunities to strengthen UH’s Health Science program collaborations and improve structures to support these collaborations. The committee invited the UH Mānoa community to give 5-minute lightning talk presentations about how their current collaborations have impacted the health and well-being of the people of Hawai‘i.
Ms. McGurk presented on the history of the 23-year partnership between the HHET and HDOH CDPHPD to collaborate on the evaluation of public health initiatives to prevent and manage chronic disease statewide. She highlighted recent HHET and HDOH CDPHPD collaborations with Hawai‘i Primary Care Association and Community Health Centers to evaluate their implementation of Diabetes Prevention Programs and Self-Measured Blood Pressure Monitoring Programs, and she also presented on current evaluation projects with Hawai‘i Public Health Institute, Kapi‘olani Community College, and the John A. Burns School of Medicine’s Department of Native Hawaiian Health that focus on training and deploying Community Health Workers to build community resiliency. Dr. Pirkle presented on three specific HHET evaluation projects, in which HHET, HDOH CDPHPD, and the Queen’s Clinically Integrated Physician Network (QCIPN) collaborated to evaluate the use of automated algorithms in QCIPN’s electronic health records to identify patients with undiagnosed hypertension and diabetes. She also highlighted a formative evaluation of workflow adjustments made within selected clinics after the algorithm identified undiagnosed cases. Dr. Pirkle and Ms. McGurk were among 22 presenters selected out of 56 UH Mānoa community submissions. A full list of submissions and the event program can be found here.