Center announces AzAHEC fellowship program

The Arizona Area Health Education Centers Program (AzAHEC) has launched an interprofessional academic fellowship program in clinical outcomes and comparative effectiveness research (COCER) focused on educating healthcare professionals in rural primary care. The new program is housed in the College of Pharmacy’s Center for Health Outcomes and PharmacoEconomic Research (the HOPE Center).

The AzAHEC COCER Fellowship Program is a two-year career development initiative that funds four postdoctorate fellows per year. The fellows come from four healthcare disciplines: one from family and community medicine (an MD), one from nursing (a DNP), one from pharmacy (a PharmD), and one from public health (a PhD or DrPH).

The 2011-2013 fellows are:

• Randa Kutob, MD, MPH
• Melanie Logue, RN, DNP, PhD
• Eleanor Olvey, PharmD, PhD candidate
• Tomás Nuño, PhD

About 80 percent of each fellow’s time is spent in research training, collaborative research projects at the advanced levels of translational research (specifically, studies on interventions in the real world from the patient to the population levels), and a mentored research project. The remaining 20 percent of each fellow’s time is devoted to interprofessional primary care practice in environments that help underserved, predominantly rural, populations in the Tucson area.

“The AzAHEC COCER Fellowship Program aims to be an example of the future of healthcare for rural underserved patients, families, and communities in Arizona,” says Ivo Abraham, professor in the Department of Pharmacy Practice and Science and an investigator in the HOPE Center.

“The program will demonstrate practice leadership across professions, evidence-based innovation across disciplines, knowledge and experience networks driven by the regional AzAHEC centers, and expertise to educate the primary care professionals of the future. The program intends to create a new type of clinician-educator for rural primary care: a person knowledgeable about and experienced in rural primary care, evidence-based innovation in health care, patient-centric and population-focused care, and the generation and application of new knowledge.”

AzAHEC funded the program with $1.7 million for three years.

For more information, contact Ivo Abraham, 520-626-4425.