Do the benefits of participation in a hypertension self-management trial persist after patients resume usual care?

Matt Maciejewski, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences. He is also a Senior Research Career Scientist and Director of the Non-randomized Design Lab in the Center of Innovation to Accelerate Discovery and Practice Transformation at the Durham VA Medical Center. Matt also holds Adjunct Professor appointments in the Schools of Public Health and Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He has received funding from NIDDK, NIDA, CMS, AHRQ, VA HSR&D, and the RWJ Foundation to conduct evaluation of long-term clinical and economic outcomes of surgical interventions, behavioral interventions and Medicare program/policy changes on patients with obesity or cardiometabolic conditions.  He is also interested in methods for addressing unobserved confounding in observational studies.  Matt evaluated the first-ever population-based implementation of value-based insurance design and led the first-ever linkage of lab results and Medicare FFS claims.  He has published over 250 papers in peer-reviewed journals such as JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, JAMA Surgery, Annals of Internal Medicine, Health Economics, Medical Care, Health Services Research, Journal of Clinical Epidemiology and Diabetes Care.

Areas of expertise: Health Services Research, Health Economics, Health Policy, Multimorbidity

Health services research, longitudinal data methods, missing data methods

Valerie A. Smith, DrPH, is an Associate Professor in the Duke University Department of Population Health Sciences and Senior Research Director of the Biostatistics Core at the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center's Center of Innovation. Her methodological research interests include: methods for semicontinuous and zero-inflated data, economic modeling methods, causal inference methods, observational study design, and longitudinal data analysis. Her current methodological research has focused on the development of marginalized models for semicontinuous data.

Dr. Smith works largely in collaboration with a multidisciplinary team of researchers, with a focus on health policy interventions, health care utilization and expenditure patterns, program and policy evaluation, obesity and weight loss, bariatric surgery evaluation, and family caregiver supportive services.

Areas of expertise: Biostatistics, Health Services Research, Health Economics, and Health Policy

My general interests are in the improve quality of care for chronic illness, using diabetes as a model. While I have performed research on screening for, diagnosis of, and clinical severity of unrecognized diabetes in patient care settings, my current line of work is in using health systems interventions to prevent cardiovascular disease, and to improve outcomes from comorbid diabetes and hypertension.

I am a health services researcher whose primary research interests are: 1) evaluating the effectiveness of primary care with an emphasis on chronic disease, 2) assessing the reasons and testing interventions to reduce racial variation in access the health care and utilization of health services, 3) determining appropriate interventions to improve blood pressure control for hypertensive patients treated in primary care. I have research expertise in racial variation, blood pressure control, disease management, and tele-medicine. I also have methodologic expertise in designing and testing health services interventions in multi-site clinical trials.

Key words: primary care, racial variation, quality of care, hypertension