274+ healthcare revenue cycle management companies to know ...

Division Of Preventive Medicine

Committed to Reducing the Burden of Disease and Increasing Opportunities for Healthier Living

The Division of Preventive Medicine (DOPM) is dedicated to improving health outcomes through collaborative research, training, community engagement, dissemination and translation of knowledge. We are working to reduce the burden of disease, increase opportunities for healthier living, and enhance the quality of life of all people.

Since its inception in 1967, the DOPM has played a key role in groundbreaking trials contributing to the knowledge of medical and health systems, behavioral aspects of disease, epidemiology, prevention, control, and disease outcome.

Research

As a research division, we generate new knowledge in epidemiology, disease prevention and control, behavioral aspects of disease, disease outcomes, and medical and health systems. Our primary scientific program areas include cancer prevention and control, diabetes and obesity, cardiovascular disease, drug use and misuse, and life-course and aging. Cross-cutting themes of health disparities, social determinants, and health outcomes are pursued through behavioral, community-based, population-based research, and biostatistics bioinformatics, and research methodologies. Our scientific accomplishments are enormous.

Education

We strive to create an academic environment that is synergistic and conducive to growth, with active training and career development programs for post-doctoral fellows and clinical scholars. We offer teaching and mentoring opportunities for faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and students, and grant writing retreats to support educational and career-development activities. Our multilevel faculty mentoring, particularly as it relates to promotion and tenure, builds the research capacity of the Division, the Department of Medicine, and the University.

Give

We have a bright outlook for the future. The support of visionary philanthropic partners provides the potential for major breakthroughs in the treatment and care of aging and older adults. UAB has long thrived on collaboration and shared progress, and we are optimistic that we will be a first choice for philanthropy for those who believe an investment in UAB is an investment in our city, state and nation.

Personalized, Preventive Medicine Is On Its Way

We'll use machine learning to predict illness before it starts, reducing pressure on the health-care system

Roxana Sultan is the chief data officer at the Vector Institute.

(This illustration was created by Maclean's art director Anna Minzhulina using the generative AI image program Imagine. Minzhulina spent weeks feeding prompts into the program, inspired by the essay.)

For some people, the words AI in health care might evoke the image of a robot conducting their physical exam. In reality, it is less sci-fi and far more hopeful: artificial intelligence is leading us toward an era of preventive and personalized health care that could change our medical system for the better.

The pandemic revealed to the Canadian public what health-care workers already knew: our system is stretched thin, and our hospitals are at capacity. People wait months for surgeries and MRIs, emergency rooms are clogged, and doctors and nurses are overworked. A big reason for that is that health care in Canada is often reactive: we rush to treat people only once they are already sick. If we instead identified specific risk factors in patients and treated them preventively, it would reduce their hospital time and improve their outcomes down the road. AI-powered algorithms can get us there.

A few hospitals are already leveraging AI and seeing great results. At the Vector Institute, where I work, we collaborated with Unity Health Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital to implement an AI model trained on historical data that determines which inpatients are most at risk of escalating to the ICU or dying, based on metrics like age, biological sex and vital-sign measurements. The hospital implemented this algorithm in 2020, and even in the context of the pandemic, it reduced ICU escalation and death by more than 20 per cent. We estimate that this translated to about 100 deaths avoided annually, and staff report that it has relieved stress and workload, allowing them to focus their attention on patients who need it most.

We also supported the development of an algorithm at Toronto's University Health Network, or UHN, that manages patients with congestive heart failure. Traditionally, those patients would be seen regularly for check-ups and would need to visit the hospital whenever they felt ill. Now, AI-powered software collects data from wearable devices and sends an alert if the patient's vitals go out of range. The alert first goes to the patient. If they cannot stabilize themselves, the software then sends an alert to the team at UHN. A nurse coordinator sets up a virtual consultation with the patient, and if they cannot resolve the issue, only then do they need to go to the hospital. This process cut heart-failure patient hospitalizations in half and allowed nurse coordinators to support six times the number of patients compared to before.

AI will revolutionize medical research. Historically, a lack of time and money prevented us from conducting randomized, controlled trials of drugs and procedures on highly diverse populations, as well as on patients with uncommon health conditions. In consequence, many of the therapies approved for care in the Western world—from pain relievers to chemotherapies—were not trialled on groups that reflected the diversity of the people using them. The beauty of AI is that we will be able to work with massive amounts of historical data from all types of people, which could open the door to more precise treatment of patients based on things like age, genetics and even socioeconomic status.

There is similar potential for diagnosing and treating rare diseases. Right now, the data we have on rare conditions at any one hospital is limited, which makes it difficult to gain insight into how to treat patients in a personalized way. By collecting data from across the country or beyond and training AI models on that data, we could identify patterns with more ease and potentially treat conditions even before they cause symptoms.

It's challenging to predict when these technologies will become widespread, because much still has to happen in the way of data governance. The more people allow the use of their de-identified medical data for science, the more we will learn about diseases, and the better we will be able to deliver more personalized care. However, it is critical that data is shared in a way that does not compromise people's safety or privacy. Work is being done to continue to improve privacy preservation in AI, and Vector is working with its health partners to test innovative, privacy-enabled ways of training models on data across multiple hospital sites. We are also having productive conversations with federal and provincial government branches to see how we can successfully implement more trustworthy and safe AI solutions in health.

To ensure the sustainability of our public health system, we cannot just keep building hospital wings and adding beds and hoping that our problems go away. We need to innovate, and AI technology could have a greater positive impact than anything I have seen in my two decades of working in health care. This is not about replacing human resources with robots. It's about enhancing personalized care delivered by people who are armed with the tools to ensure that we can achieve optimal health outcomes for all.

We reached out to Canada's top AI thinkers in fields like ethics, health and computer science and asked them to predict where AI will take us in the coming years, for better or worse. The results may sound like science fiction—but they're coming at you sooner than you think. To stay ahead of it all, read the other essays that make up our AI cover story, which was published in the November 2023 issue of Maclean's.

UT Tyler Receives Over $1 Million In Funding For Preventive Medicine

UT Tyler received $1,091,720 from the Health Resources and Services Administration for the General Preventive Residency program, which will help the program add more residents and fund more educational opportunities.

"It's going to be a springboard to put more preventive medicine residents in this region," program director Dr. Peter Pendergrass said.

The program started on July 1, 2022 and is one of two general preventive medicine programs in Texas. They received grant funding in May 2023 and will cover four years. The program accepts two residents per year and will expand to three residents. In the end, they will have six total, according to Pendergrass.

"We're looking for physicians of all different types that are interested in this opportunity in preventive medicine," said Dr. Michelle Crum, Assistant Professor of the School of Health Professionals. "The exciting thing about that is it allows us to meet people where they are and go into the communities and serve that need."

The grant will help with being able to send residents to training outside of the region. Some of the training the grant will fund includes an emergency preparedness training in the Rio Grande Valley with Operation Border Health Preparedness, a smoking cessation training at and a survivorship focused on secondary cancer at, MD Anderson in Houston, according to Pendergrass.

"Many cancers are preventable, either through good behavioral health where people eat well and exercise, those kinds of activities that have a positive effect on reducing cancer rates," Pendergrass said. "But it also will allow them to really understand how you screen for these diseases and to help prevent it that way."

East Texas has high rates of uninsured people, lack of access in rural areas and many health needs, according to Pendergrass. The 2021 Northeast Texas Health Status Report showed this region has higher rates than the rates statewide.

"If Northeast Texas were a state, among states it would have ranked 47th in heart disease mortality, 48th in cancer mortality, 50th in stroke mortality, 51st in chronic lower respiratory disease mortality and 44th in death from all causes," according to the health status report.

UT Tyler School of Medicine Dean Brigham Willis is excited about the grant and believes it will lead to a more collaborative care model where you could go see your primary doctor, then after see a preventive doctor about healthy eating.

The grant links them with a Federally Qualified Health Center, Family Circle of Care, where they will be working with a quality person to do quality improvement data analysis and population projects, according to Pendergrass.

In the future, the program wants to have a tobacco cessation program with the school of psychology that their residents can participate in. The grant will help them add a lifestyle medicine course, according to Pendergrass. The residents are getting training now to help with coaching patients with both prevention and treatment for conditions like diabetes, according to Crum.

"We want to be able to work directly within these clinics that serve the communities right there," Crum said. "Where we basically meet their needs and if we can help find physicians that have a heart to serve in these rural communities in East Texas, it really does make a big impact over time."

Tyler Morning Telegraph/Report for America

---