Dr. Karen Kelly-Blake promoted to associate professor

Karen Kelly-Blake photoThe Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences is thrilled to announce the promotion of Dr. Karen Kelly-Blake to associate professor. Dr. Kelly-Blake holds an appointment in both the Center for Ethics and the Department of Medicine in the College of Human Medicine (CHM).

Dr. Kelly-Blake holds a PhD in medical anthropology from Michigan State University and specializes in health services research, shared decision-making, and medical workforce policy and development. She joined the Center in 2009 as a project manager on a grant of Dr. Margaret Holmes-Rovner’s, became a research associate in 2011, and assistant professor in 2014. She has played an integral part in the development and implementation of social context of clinical decisions (SCCD) content in the CHM Shared Discovery Curriculum.

Dr. Kelly-Blake is currently working with colleagues in the Department of Medicine, the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics to resubmit an NIH R01 to assess implementation of the Office Guidelines Applied to Practice Program for medication adherence for heart disease management in people with diabetes in Federally Qualified Healthcare Centers across the state of Michigan. She is also working with colleagues at the University of Michigan to submit a new NIH R01 to assess a multi-level clinical intervention for patient navigator enhanced colorectal cancer screening in community primary care practice settings. Additionally, she is working with the Assistant Director of the Center for Ethics on a project to assess the value of patient-physician concordance on patient health outcomes.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Kelly-Blake!

Listen: Activating and Empowering Patients

No Easy Answers in Bioethics logoNo Easy Answers in Bioethics Episode 15

How can shared decision-making tools and evidence-based guidelines be used to ensure that every patient receives the best care possible? How can patients be activated and equipped to interact with their provider and manage their health condition? In this episode, three Michigan State University researchers—Dr. Bill Hart-Davidson, Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, Dr. Karen Kelly-Blake, Assistant Professor in the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences and the Department of Medicine, and Dr. Ade Olomu, Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine—discuss a shared decision-making tool they developed called Office-GAP, Office-Guidelines Applied to Practice. Together they discuss the origins of the project, and the results so far in improving outcomes for patients managing chronic illness by using a simple checklist to get patients and providers on the same page.

Ways to Listen

This episode was produced and edited by Liz McDaniel in the Center for Ethics. Music: “While We Walk (2004)” by Antony Raijekov via Free Music Archive, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. Full episode transcript available.

About: No Easy Answers in Bioethics is a podcast series from the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences in the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine. Each month Center for Ethics faculty and their collaborators discuss their ongoing work and research across many areas of bioethics. Episodes are hosted by H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online.

Drs. Kelly-Blake and Holmes-Rovner co-authors of shared decision making article

Kelly-BlakeHolmes-RovnerCenter Assistant Professor Dr. Karen Kelly-Blake and Professor Emerita Dr. Margaret Holmes-Rovner are among the co-authors of the article “Implementing shared decision making in federally qualified health centers, a quasi-experimental design study: the Office-Guidelines Applied to Practice (Office-GAP) program,” published on August 2, 2016 in the open-access journal BMC Health Services Research. The study was authored by MSU researchers Adesuwa Olomu, William Hart-Davidson, Zhehui Luo, Karen Kelly-Blake and Margaret Holmes-Rovner.

Abstract
Background: Use of Shared Decision-Making (SDM) and Decision Aids (DAs) has been encouraged but is not regularly implemented in primary care. The Office-Guidelines Applied to Practice (Office-GAP) intervention is an application of a previous model revised to address guidelines based care for low-income populations with diabetes and coronary heart disease (CHD). Objective: To evaluate Office-GAP Program feasibility and preliminary efficacy on medication use, patient satisfaction with physician communication and confidence in decision in low-income population with diabetes and coronary heart disease (CHD) in a Federally Qualified Healthcare Center (FQHC).

The full article is available on the BMC Health Services Research website.