USC scientists receive healthcare grants
In the last month, faculty involved with USC’s health economics program received three separate healthcare reform research grants from the federal government totaling about $20 million.
The funding came from a $1.1 billion commitment by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to research comparative effectiveness, which, according to USC Vice President of Research Randolph Hall, is the study of understanding which treatments and therapies for patients are most productive and cost-effective.
“There is quite a bit of variability in how healthcare is practiced around the country, even within an individual clinic,” Hall said. “[This research] is a way of creating a more scientific and systematic way of delivering care so that the patient gets better results.”
Though all three research initiatives fall into the category of comparative effectiveness, each project is different, focusing on a separate facet of the improvement of healthcare in the United States.
“[These grants are] unprecedented for this area of research,” Hall said. “And now we’re really moving up to be one of the top programs in the entire country.”
The $11.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health — the largest ever received by the pharmacy school — will go to Jason Doctor, an associate professor of psychology and behavioral economics at the School of Pharmacy, to study ways to eliminate unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions.
The second grant awarded $5.5 million to Dana Goldman, director of the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at USC.
Goldman’s grant is also funded by NIH, as part of a holistic program addressing the top priorities of NIH Director Francis Collins. Goldman and his team will research ways to reform Medicare.
And lastly, $3 million from the Department of Health and Human Services was given to Shinyi Wu, an assistant professor in the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
Wu, alongside co-principal investigator Kathleen Ell from the USC School of Social Work, will work on enhancing the treatment for people who are both depressed and diabetic.
All three research projects together will involve at least a dozen faculty and possibly 20 or more staff overall. This is large compared to a typical grant, which usually includes one faculty member and one student, according to Steven Moldin, executive director of the USC Washington, D.C. Office of Research Advancement.
The effect of the grants and the subsequent research will help expand the health economics program, he said, which is a fairly new department at USC.
“This research [allows us to build] our program here in health economics and health policy to further establish USC as a leader in those fields,” Moldin said. “[It will enhance] the schools reputation and also provide all these wonderful opportunities for a lot of clinical research.”