Current Projects
Project Name: Health Equity
Funded By: Health Equity Innovation Awards
Our Goal: To include the patient voice when co-creating systems designed to address health equity and social determinants of health
Brief Description: To complete this project we will:
- Embed open-ended questions to an ongoing telehealth equity study that reaches diverse low SES populations; and
- Conduct 4-6 focus groups to dive deeper in exploring how to co-create an approach that realistically meets the patients' needs and the health care system's ability to meet them.
Project Name: Closing the Loop
Funded By: Academic Pediatric Association
Our Goal: To develop a new protocol with Head Start family advocates to routinely screen food security status in Head Start families.
Brief Description: We will conduct 4 focus groups with 8-12 participants in each. One focus group will be with Head Start employees and the other three with Head Start families (both English- and Spanish-speaking).
Project Name: Food for Thought
Funded By: The Joe C. Davis Foundation
Our Goal: To measurably improve family health by delivering an adapted evidence-based 12-week intervention.
Brief Description: We will recruit 120 families with children ages 3-8 years old from community partner organizations and the DOT 8 Clinic. All participants will complete a pre and post survey on child nutrition, physical activity, sleep, and several other wellness variables. All families will receive weekly teaching kitchen video recipes and associated groceries delivered to their home. Half of the families will be randomly assigned to an intervention group that also receives weekly, 30-minute healthy behavior skills building calls with a health coach.
Project Name: Telehealth Equity
Funded By: National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities
Our Goal: To examine how pediatric patient-families like and use virtual video healthcare visits in order to maximize feasibility and satisfaction for vulnerable populations.
Brief Description: To complete this project we will:
- Recruit 500 patient-families from the DOT 8 clinic to evaluate the relationship of telehealth uptake to language spoken, trust in physician, rate/ethnicity, social determinants of health, COVID-19 impact, technology access, and digital literacy.
- Prospectively design, implement, and assess the feasibility and acceptability of modifications to the standard telehealth approach in 100+ diverse pediatric patients from the DOT 8 Clinic.
Project Name: COACH/R03/Med Weight
Funded By:
Our Goal: To test the effectiveness of a personalized behavior change interventions for parent and child BMI over two years among Latino parent-child pairs.
Brief Description: Randomized control trial that includes the participation of 300 parent-child pairs.
Completed Projects
Project Name: Salud con la Familia (Health with the Family)
Funded By: State of Tennessee
Description: Our goal was to improve the health of Latino families by spurring lasting lifestyle changes. In our study, 41% of Latino preschoolers started overweight. Children in the intervention group were twice as likely to achieve normal BMI compared to the control group after a 12 weekly skills-building program.
Project Name: Salud America!
Funded By: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Description: Our goal was to increase access to community fitness centers for Latino families in order to promote physical activity. We developed and tested a policy and program assessment for Parks and Recreation facilities with Latino family patrons. Latino families exposed to community center programming were 4 times more likely to be using the center a year later than unexposed families with the same geographic access.
Project Name: Coleman Afterschool Program
Funded By: Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, Vanderbilt Institute for Obesity and Metabolism
Description: Our study found that children in low-cost parks-based program were more active than children in school-based care. The gender gap was decreased between boys and girls in the amount of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity.
Project Name: Madre Sana, Bebe Sano (Healthy Mother, Healthy Baby)
Funded By: American Heart Association, Vanderbilt Diabetes Research and Training Center
Description: The goal of this study was to develop and test effective recruiting strategies with hard-to-reach populations and pilot a curriculum for a scaled-up follow-up study to reduce excess gestational weight gain in underserved mothers.
Project Name: Madre Sana, Embarazo Sano (Healthy Mother, Healthy Pregnancy)
Funded By: State of Tennessee
Description: Compared to usual care, fewer normal weight women in the intervention exceeded weight gain recommendations during pregnancy (47% versus 7%).
Project Name: CASTLES at Hadley Park
Funded By: State of Tennessee
Description: During this study, we trained Parks & Recreation staff to use a curriculum promoting physical activity to reduce obesity disparities in at-risk communities. Our findings resulted in policy change rerouting school buses to transport children directly to the community center after school every day.
Project Name: Growing Right Onto Wellness (GROW)
Funded By: National Institutes of Health, National Heart, Blood, and Lung Institute and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Description: This project was the largest and longest prevention study with 610 families of underserved preschoolers at-risk for obesity. Resulted in new sustainable, evidence-based programs for Parks and Library partners with increased patrons using existing built environment and community resources.
View the GROW study final results (PDF) English | Spanish
Project Name: GROW Baby
Funded By: National Institutes of Health, National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute
Description: Assessing the link between maternal weight gain during pregnancy and child BMI postpartum among women who became pregnant during the GROW trial.
Project Name: Adapting a Prevention Treatment Project - ADAPT
Funded By: National Institutes of Health and National Cancer Institute
Description: Tested a process to export the Healthier Families evidence-based, family-focused, community-centered healthy-living curriculum for Parks sites to three diverse states: Georgia, Michigan and Nevada.
Project Name: Competency-based Approaches to Community Health - COACH
Funded By: Department of Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Turner-Hazinski Award
Description: Evaluating a childhood obesity prevention intervention based on a personalized, competency-based model adapted from the learning sciences.
View the COACH study final results (PDF, Spanish)
Project Name: Teaching Kitchen Outreach - TKO
Funded By: Andrew Allen Charitable Foundation
Description: Implementation science: building an exportable, scaling-up program of hands-on healthy-eating and cooking skills-building sessions for families with children in the setting of Parks after-school programs. Reach is over 500 children, across all 25 Parks centers in Nashville, with 25 trained Parks staff facilitators and master trainers to build and sustain internal capacity.
Project Name: Building New Social Networks
Funded By: National Institutes of Health, National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute
Description: New social network ties are associated with increased cohesion among group participants in a group-based intervention.