Improving medication adherence in cardiovascular disease.

Neha J. Pagidipati, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and cardiovascular disease prevention specialist.  Since 2011, she has conducted research on cardiometabolic disease prevention, lifestyle modification and weight management.  She is currently an NIH K12 scholar in Implementation and Dissemination Science. 

Dr. Pagidipati is building the Duke Cardiometabolic Disease Prevention Program, which focuses on behavior change and risk factor management in patients with high risk of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases such as diabetes and obesity.  The program’s multi-disciplinary team of cardiologists, endocrinologists, nephrologists, and hepatologists will work together to provide coordinated, team-based care to the most high-risk and complex patients in the health system. 

Dr. Pagidipati’s research grants include the COORDINATE-Diabetes Trial, to improve the quality of care for patients with diabetes and cardiovascular disease across the U.S., and QuBBD:  Deep Poisson Methods for Biomedical Time-to-Event and Longitudinal Data.  She served as a study clinician on the large, longitudinal EXSCEL (Exenatide Study of Cardiovascular Event Lowering) trial.  She is currently conducting a nation-wide study of obesity management using real-world data sources, and is a site investigator for the Baseline Health Study in collaboration with Verily Life Sciences. In addition, she is leading a large study within the Duke Health System to study heterogeneity within cardiovascular disease risk and response to weight loss interventions among individuals with obesity. 

Dr. Pagidipati graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School.  She completed her internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.  During a two-year research fellowship in Global Women’s Health at the Brigham, she obtained an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health and studied cardiovascular disease prevention in women in India.  Dr. Pagidipati completed a four-year cardiology fellowship at the Duke University School of Medicine and served as Chief Research Fellow at the Duke Clinical Research Institute.  In 2017, she became a faculty member of the Duke University School of Medicine School. 

Dr. Bosworth is a health services researcher and Deputy Director of the Center of Innovation to Accelerate Discovery and Practice Transformation (ADAPT)  at the Durham VA Medical Center. He is also Vice Chair of Education and Professor of Population Health Sciences. He is also a Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry, and Nursing at Duke University Medical Center and Adjunct Professor in Health Policy and Administration at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests comprise three overarching areas of research: 1) clinical research that provides knowledge for improving patients’ treatment adherence and self-management in chronic care; 2) translation research to improve access to quality of care; and 3) eliminate health care disparities. 

Dr. Bosworth is the recipient of an American Heart Association established investigator award, the 2013 VA Undersecretary Award for Outstanding Achievement in Health Services Research (The annual award is the highest honor for VA health services researchers), and a VA Senior Career Scientist Award. In terms of self-management, Dr. Bosworth has expertise developing interventions to improve health behaviors related to hypertension, coronary artery disease, and depression, and has been developing and implementing tailored patient interventions to reduce the burden of other chronic diseases. These trials focus on motivating individuals to initiate health behaviors and sustaining them long term and use members of the healthcare team, particularly pharmacists and nurses. He has been the Principal Investigator of over 30 trials resulting in over 400 peer reviewed publications and four books. This work has been or is being implemented in multiple arenas including Medicaid of North Carolina, private payers, The United Kingdom National Health System Direct, Kaiser Health care system, and the Veterans Affairs.

Areas of Expertise: Health Behavior, Health Services Research, Implementation Science, Health Measurement, and Health Policy