Register today to attend Measuring What Matters, a symposium focused on associations between social determinants of health (SDoH), chronic disease, and health outcomes, including health related quality of life (HRQL). Scheduled for 16-17 July 2024, this virtual event will consist of session presentations and live Q&As with the speakers.

Session Highlight

Session 2: Addressing SDoH to Improve Health and Well-Being

In the second session of the 2024 Measuring What Matters Symposium, representatives from the CDC and NIMHD will discuss conceptualizations of SDoH and strategies for addressing SDoH from research and programmatic perspectives. A community-level intervention to address blood pressure will be used as an example to highlight how clinic and community linked interventions can address SDoH and improve outcomes.

Session Speakers:

Karen Hacker, MD MPH

National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, CDC

  
Karen Hacker is the Director of CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, where she oversees a portfolio that includes Maternal Mortality, School health, obesity prevention, smoking policies and the leading chronic diseases. Dr. Hacker has a long history of public health practice and has held a variety of leadership roles in public health, hospital administration, and academics. Dr. Hacker received her MD from Northwestern University School of Medicine and her MPH from Boston University School of Public Health and continues to see patients as a primary care physician in adolescent medicine.

Deborah Duran, PhD

National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), National Institutes of Health

  
Dr. Duran is the Senior Advisor on Data Science, Analytics and Systems to the Director of the National Institutes of Minority and Health Disparities at the National Institutes of Health. She focuses on implicit and explicit biases in data curation, AI and ethics, machine learning algorithms, predictive analytics, risk stratification, unjust implementations, and inclusive natural language processing. She advocates for the inclusion of social determinant of health (SDOH) in big data systems to enable comprehensive diagnostics, treatments, and interventions to reduce health disparities. Prior to this role, she has been the director of science policy, scientific planning, and data analytics for over 20 years, including Performance Director for NIH. She is an author and received two HHS secretarial awards and numerous NIH awards exemplifying her leadership skills and ability to advance science. She strives to ensure health disparity topics benefit from emerging data science innovations, and that researcher adopt the advantages of large data sets and technologies to reduce health disparities. To achieve this end, she is the co-founder of the ScHARe platform designed for population science, including social determinants of health, behavioral and environmental data sets, to provide the advantages of big data for health disparity research. The target audience are women and populations underrepresented in data science, as well as low resource minority serving institutions, community colleges, and those isolated who want to do cloud computing health disparity and health delivery research.

Shari Bolen, MD MPH

The MetroHealth System and Case Western Reserve University

  
Dr. Bolen is the Alfred F. Connor Sr. Health Services and Population Health Research Professor, Professor of Medicine and Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), Founding Director of the Population Health and Equity Research Institute at The MetroHealth System, and a general internal medicine physician. Dr. Bolen serves as the Director of Cardiovascular Disease Programs for Better Health Partnership – a regional health improvement collaborative and co-leads the Ohio Cardiovascular and Diabetes Health Collaborative (Cardi-OH) funded by the Ohio Department of Medicaid and Heart Healthy Ohio Initiative funded by the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality. Nationally, she recently served on the Department of Health and Human Services National Clinical Care Commission charged with developing recommendations to congress on addressing gaps in federal programs and policies for persons living with diabetes and serves on the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention National Hypertension Control Roundtable. Her career has focused on implementation of evidence-based strategies and innovative programs within primary care clinics to improve cardiovascular health outcomes and advance health equity in these outcomes with a specific interest in diabetes, obesity, and hypertension. Her primary goal is to improve the care of the patients and communities she serves.