Research & Scholarship

The Research & Scholarship Pillar is lead by Nickolas “Nick” Zaller, PhD. Dr. Zaller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education in the UAMS College of Public Health.

The Scholarship and Research team develops the strategic vision of scholarly activities for the Office of IPE. The team is made up of faculty from every college, library science, UAMS institutes, and Arkansas Children’s Hospital. They are working to create an institutional bibliography of IPE-related scholarly works from UAMS, foster collaborative research opportunities across the institution, and expand partnerships with established research entities at UAMS.

This pillar focuses on interprofessional education opportunities for emerging populace health concerns. Three of our current areas of focus are:

Education:  There is a paucity of IPE related research at academic medical centers across the US.  While some existing preliminary data suggests that IPE can improve patient related outcomes, there are insufficient longitudinal studies supporting this.  This group explores funding opportunities which seek to better understand how implementation of IPE within the academic medical center setting can improve the Triple Aim (patient experience, population health, and healthcare costs).  Funding opportunities focus on clinical care, clinical training or research and will explicitly examine how IPE impacts each of these domains.

Opioids: With the current local, regional and national emphasis on prescription drug misuse, and its associated adverse health and social costs, this group explores funding opportunities related to opioid misuse/abuse/addiction.  Identified funding opportunities will be interprofessional in nature by including a variety of disciplines.  Funding opportunities could focus on clinical care, education and training, or research but must involve several health professions represented at UAMS.

Vaccines: Suboptimal vaccination coverage remains a problem in Arkansas.  Recent outbreaks of mumps and low HPV vaccination uptake illustrate the need to re-focus efforts to ensure sufficient vaccination coverage across the state, and in particular among specific sub-populations, e.g. Marshallese and adolescent girls.  Funding opportunities identified will be interprofessional in nature by including a variety of disciplines.  Funding opportunities could focus on clinical care, education and training, or research but must involve several health professions represented at UAMS.

PROFILES

In the summer of 2015, the IPE Scholarship/Research team partnered with the UAMS Translational Research Institute and the UAMS Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute to bring “Profiles” to UAMS. Profiles is a research management system that allows researchers to collaborate locally, nationally, and internationally.  The researcher’s profile displays contact information, biographies, research interests, current projects, and selected publications along with research connections and collaborations. Profiles will allow the UAMS research arm to develop interprofessional collaborations throughout the institution and beyond.

UAMS is dedicated to the development of IPE Research and Scholarship.