Catherine Wetmore knows how to persuade people to talk.
While completing her PhD in Epidemiology at the University of Washington, she spearheaded a study that required her to recruit people from a busy emergency department waiting room, talk them into answering extensive survey questions, and persuade them to undergo a physical exam.“You have to find the right balance between conveying the importance of the research in terms that are just scientific enough to show that you have the expertise but not so technical that people are scared off,” Catherine said.
At IHME, Catherine is striking that balance with her work on an ambitious project to develop a surveillance system for heart, lung, and kidney diseases in the US, with King County, Washington, as the pilot location. Her team will use data from large-scale phone surveys, with a subset of respondents asked to participate in a follow-up physical exam.“It will allow us to compare the answers they gave us over the phone to findings in the clinic and analyze the difference between what we’re measuring and what they reported,” Catherine said. The system also will help identify disparities in health care and health outcomes associated with race and socio-economic status.“By pinpointing where the shortcomings in the system are, local, state, and national agencies will be able to target their funding to have the biggest impact,” Catherine said.
Spending limited resources wisely is also a goal of Catherine’s other project at IHME. She is helping design a survey of health facilities around the world to find the drivers behind their costs and revenues. The project for the Costing research team aims to calculate the cost of specific interventions and to determine how investments in equipment, staffing, and other factors translate into better health outcomes.“To our knowledge, this is the first study that attempts to collect such rich data on all the different components of the health system,” Catherine said. “It’s important to determine what the benefit is from investments in X-ray machines, additional nurses, or specific pharmaceuticals in different health care settings.”
IHME will pilot the survey first in Lebanon, a country with extensive cost and revenue data and then make necessary adjustments before implementing the survey on a broader scale. Catherine’s work on both projects is grounded in her earlier experience roaming the halls of Harborview Medical Center in Seattle to recruit survey participants. Even as survey responses are punched into databases and turned into computer code, they remain tied to the people who agree to volunteer.“If you are clear about why you are conducting this research, more often than not people want to help,” Catherine said. “That’s why it’s so great to work at a place where they take both the overall strategy and the little details of each project seriously. It’s not just about collecting data but collecting data the right way.”
