Invisible partners in care: Snapshot of well-being among caregivers receiving comprehensive support from Veterans Affairs.

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

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

My research career has centered on understanding how to improve delivery of new evidence-based practices in health care systems. I work in health services research and development for the VA health care system and have an academic appointment with the Duke University School of Medicine. I create study designs that integrate qualitative and quantitative methods (mixed-methods) and apply Implementation Science and System Science approaches. I currently have a developing body of academic work that uses participatory system dynamics modeling as a strategy to identify system level factors that affect development and implementation of equitable AI tools. For the VA health care system, I direct a cross-functional team that conducts rapid turnaround projects for high priority needs by VHA national, regional, and facility leaders.

Dr. Megan Shepherd-Banigan designs research studies to improve the health, emotional well-being, and social functioning of adults with mental and physical disabilities. Her methods combine empirical approaches that address methodologically challenging research questions in health systems and policy research. Dr. Shepherd-Banigan uses large survey and administrative datasets to evaluate the impact of policies that support family members to care for adults with disabilities.  

Dr. Shepherd-Banigan won a VA Career Development Award from 2019-2024 and is studying ways to strengthen family support for veterans under-going traumatic stress treatment. She also leads a project that surveys family caregivers of Vietnam-era veterans who might be eligible for expanded support services under the VA Mission Act to evaluate program impacts. As co-investigator on an NIA-funded CARE IDEAS study (Terri Wetle, PI) , she is investigating end-of-life-care planning and well-being among dementia care dyads.  Finally, Dr. Shepherd-Banigan is leading a project in partnership with the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers to identify creative empirically-based approaches to support family caregivers. 

Dr. Courtney Van Houtven is a Professor in The Department of Population Health Science, Duke University School of Medicine and Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy. She is also a Research Career Scientist in The Center of Innovation to Accelerate Discovery and Practice Transformation (ADAPT), Durham Veterans Affairs Health Care System. Dr. Van Houtven’s aging and economics research interests encompass long-term care financing, intra-household decision-making, unpaid family and friend care, and home- and community-based services. She examines how family caregiving affects health care utilization, expenditures, health and work outcomes of care recipients and caregivers. She is also interested in understanding how best to support family caregivers to optimize caregiver and care recipient outcomes.

Dr. Van Houtven  is co-PI on the QUERI Program Project, “Optimizing Function and Independence”, in which her caregiver skills training program developed as an RCT in VA, now called Caregivers FIRST, has been implemented at 125 VA sites nationally. The team will evaluate how intensification of an implementation strategy changes adoption. She directs the VA-CARES Evaluation Center, which evaluates the VA’s Caregiver Support Program. She leads a mixed methods R01 study as PI from the National Institute on Aging that will assess the value of "home time" for persons living with dementia and their caregivers (RF1 AG072364).

Areas of expertise: Health Services Research and Health Economics