Abstract

Dr. Teresa M Damush, a VA HSR&D 8/8ths (15/3) Research Career Scientist at the Indianapolis Roudebush VAMC is applying to renew her current Research Career Scientist (RCS) award as a Senior Research Career Scientist (SRCS). During the past 2 decades, Dr. Damush has led and evaluated local, regional, and large scaled, nationwide implementation interventions of evidence-based practices related to VA specialty care, neurological (e.g., stroke/TIA and headache) healthcare services in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). She has extensive experience in conducting productive collaborations with VA operational partners in quality improvement initiatives (QUERI) and with HSR&D investigators nationally on key topics (e.g., access) related to VA priorities. During her current RCS award, Dr. Damush has served as the corresponding Principal Investigator of two large, VA HSR&D QUERI Implementation Centers: (PRIS-M: Precision Monitoring to Transform Care (PRIS-M) from 2015-2020 and Expanding Expertise Through E-health Network Development (EXTEND) from 2020-2025. She also recently completed as PI an HSR&D funded implementation pilot (TENACITY) testing the delivery of CBT-Headache protocol via telehealth across 3 diverse VAMC contexts for specialty care headache services. In her SRCS, Dr. Damush plans to expand and elucidate on the effective implementation strategies to deliver telehealth models of evidence-based care as well as identify effective spread and sustainment strategies across VHA. In 2023, Dr. Damush applied her implementation strategy bundle research to understand the implementation of colorectal cancer screening in urban and rural Indiana healthcare organizations and clinics. Thus Dr. Damush has served as PI/Co-PI on 5 grants during her current RCS award with funding equaled to over $15 million. She is a nationally (e.g., Rutten-Mayo Clinic) and internationally (e.g., Sustainability-Lennox in Handbook on Implementation Science; Cochrane Collaboration; Low Back Pain -Ulm University, Germany) cited researcher. Her implementation research has been featured in both the VA Virtual Implementation and University-based Journal Clubs. She has presented consistently with 137 peer-reviewed presentations at National Scientific Conferences, cyberseminars and has published 126 peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts including high impact scientific journals. Dr. Damush provides mentoring to health services researchers and implementation scientists from a variety of disciplines including medicine, nursing, psychology, engineering, pharmacy, public health, and anthropology. In 2021, Dr. Damush successfully competed for a VA HSR&D Advanced Learning Healthcare System (LHS) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and serves as its Co-Director at the Indianapolis CHIC Coin. Dr. Damush also Co-Directs the VA HSR&D EXTEND QUERI Center Mentoring Program. Dr. Damush also expanded her chronic pain research to chronic headache leading the Qualitative and Implementation Core of the Congressional mandated VHA Headache Centers of Excellence (HCoE) alongside the National VA Director of the HCoEs, Dr. Jason Sico. Most recently, she has expanded this research to study equitable access to high quality headache care in the VHA in collaboration with the VA Offices of Health Equity, Emergency Medicine, Neurology, and Primary Care. With the renewal of the SRCS, Dr. Damush plans to assess the equitable access to high quality, specialty headache care in VHA to inform, develop, test, and evaluate a Stepped Care Model for Headache Management (SCM-HM). This line of research holds great potential to bridge current gaps in chronic headache care and positively impact Veterans’ chronic headache care and quality of life by elucidating and standardizing clinical pathways across primary care, emergency care and specialty care services.

NIH Reporter Project Information: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10922563


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