Despite overall improvements in health in the United States, there continue to be substantial health disparities within ethnic/racial minority populations (e.g., African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians) and underserved majority populations. These disparities are believed to be the result of a complex interaction of many variables, such as biological factors, the environment, patients' health behaviors, and inadequate provider training. Greater efforts are needed to develop effective and efficient methods to reduce and ultimately eliminate these disparities. The Center for the Enhancement of Healthcare Training and Outcomes (CEHTO) is a biopsychosocial training program for medical, nursing, and graduate students, other prospective health care professionals, and faculty at the Uniformed Services University. An effective infrastructure for Project EXPORT, CEHTO was established to optimize patient adherence and treatment outcomes by enhancing health providers' interpersonal/communication skills with diverse patients, educating practitioners about health disparities, and highlighting the importance of establishing collaborative patient-provider relationships. Therefore, the goals of the USU Health Disparities Research and Outreach Project, our proposed EXPORT Center, will be to: (1) Carry out research to systematically investigate issues central to the understanding and amelioration of health disparities (e.g., evaluate recently developed training methods to improve medical providers' knowledge and skills to reduce health disparities, and explore other bio-behavioral and biomedical contributions to health care disparities in minority groups); (2) educate students, faculty, and health care professionals about health disparities and methods to reduce disparate treatment and improve healthcare outcomes; (3) Develop mutually-beneficial and collaborative research and training partnerships with ethnic/minority community groups (e.g., churches, community health centers and providers, the YMCA, etc.), academic institutions, scientific communities, and medical centers; (4) Use culturally-tailored strategies to disseminate specific, health-relevant information to our community partners; and (5) Create effective mechanisms to recruit and train minority students in the biomedical sciences, research, and the health care fields.
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