Chronic diseases and conditions (e.g., arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, injury-based disabilities) affect more than one-third of adults 65 or older, one-fifth of the population age 60 and older (e.g., 10 million people have diabetes), and one-seventh of the Americans who die annually. The need for self-management programs that enable patients to learn the disease characteristics, practice healthy behaviors, and handle chronic disorders is critical. This research will focus on the complexity of self-management by focusing on participant-centered outcomes, modifications of existing and development of innovative strategies for health self-management through interaction with healthcare providers and reinforcement of positive outcomes. Building on our significant prior experience in developing techniques for management, processing, analysis and visualization of complex multidimensional dataset, the Methods and Analytics Core (MACORE) of the Complexity of Self-management in Chronic Disuse (CSCD) Center will provide the necessary infrastructure and resources to support engagement of patients, family, caregivers, researchers and stakeholders. Specifically, MACORE will support CSCD research projects (pilots, collaborations and services) with data collection and aggregation, formulation and testing of clinically-relevant research hypotheses (across space, time, disease state, phenotypes and treatment regiments), and algorithms to elicit the intricate relations, complex associations, causal connections and complex patterns in the self-management data. The MACORE specific aims are designed to support the broader CSCD-wide Center aims by leveraging complexity to advance the science of self-management for the promotion of health in chronic illness. We will explore new strategies for mentorship by interdisciplinary teams, utilizing innovative methods for analyzing the effects of complex interventions and facilitating development of symposia focused on complex methodology. MACORE will link novice investigators with resources to facilitate development as independent researchers and to lead interdisciplinary teams and develop a range of techniques and supporting documentation for selecting appropriate methods to address complexity for self-management study designs, data processing, and analytical protocols. Finally, the Core will provide methodological and analytic expertise and tools to collaborators and pilot project investigators and develop the CSCD computational infrastructure enabling efficient and reliable end-to-end computational workflow solutions for advanced data analytics.
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