: The candidate: Dr. Bayliss is a Clinician Investigator at Kaiser Permanente, Colorado (KPCO) and Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. She is an experienced family physician and has completed a primary care research fellowship and MSPH degree. She has conducted initial promising work on barriers to self-care for persons with multiple chronic medical conditions, and the impact of comorbid medical conditions on physical functioning. Her long term goals are to generate evidence-based recommendations for the care of persons with multiple chronic medical conditions by: Identifying issues relevant to the process of care for this population;designing practical tools and interventions to improve this process;and encouraging providers and policy makers to investigate alternatives to exclusive use of disease-specific models. The Environment: Dr. Bayliss is based at KPCO in the Clinical Research Unit (CRU). The CRU consists of over 90 staff and investigators devoted to conducting and translating high quality research into practice. Her primary mentor is Dr. Russell Glasgow, a Senior Scientist at KPCO and an international expert in the field of self-care for chronic disease. She has additional strong working relationships with other members of her mentoring team who have combined expertise in health services research, survey development, psychometrics, medication adherence, and translation of research into practice. The Research: The care of persons with multiple medical conditions is a critical national health care issue and an AHRQ priority. Successful outcomes for persons with chronic conditions depend heavily on self-management. Barriers to self-management for this population are not well defined. We are developing a questionnaire to assess barriers to self-management for persons with multiple chronic conditions. The goal of this proposal is to pilot test and validate this questionnaire;administer it in 5 important study populations available through KPCO;revise it into a practical, clinically useful tool;and begin to implement it in the clinical arena. A valid and reliable instrument to assess barriers to self management will lay the groundwork for clinical interventions to address these barriers and improve health outcomes.
