Dr. Cheryl Wisseh’s proposal, “Multilevel Pilot Intervention to Improve Adherence to Self-Monitoring of Blood Glucose and Antihyperglycemic Medication Regimens Among Non-Hispanic Black Adults Living with Type 2 Diabetes,” has been selected for a UC END DISPARITIES Pilot Award.
UC END DISPARITIES Pilot Awards, an initiative of the UCLA-UCI Center for Eliminating Cardiometabolic Disparities in Multi-Ethnic Populations, provide funding to research projects that focus on eliminating health disparities among underrepresented minority communities in Los Angeles and Orange Counties. In particular, the awards support research that serves people living with hypertension, stroke, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease.
Dr. Wisseh’s project centers on the interpersonal, institutional, and policy factors that influence self-care and disease management among non-Hispanic Black adults living with type 2 diabetes. A person’s adherence to a medication regimen, blood sugar monitoring, and other diabetes management techniques can be impacted by the quality of their social support system (interpersonal), their relationship with their health care provider (institutional), and their access to diabetes management technology (policy), among other factors.
To address these issues and ultimately improve patient outcomes, Dr. Wisseh’s study proposes “a multilevel intervention that includes patient-partner dyads, provider-pharmacist-community health coach collaboration, and access to continuous glucose monitoring devices.”
“We are also developing a community-clinic-academic partnership through which we will plan and implement a culturally appropriate curriculum to train the community health coaches to interact with and support the participants,” Dr. Wisseh explained.
With the support of the UC END DISPARITIES Pilot Award, Dr. Wisseh aims to begin planning the details of the program with her community and clinic partners and building the research team. The award will, in part, fund compensation for the project’s community partner and community health coaches.
The goals of the proposal are aligned with Dr. Wisseh’s past studies and overall research mission.
“My research program broadly examines the relationships between the determinants of health, the health of racially and ethnically minoritized populations, and their health outcomes,” she said. “My research aims to answer the question: ‘What is the pharmacist’s role in reducing racial and ethnic health disparities?’”
Recently, Dr. Wisseh and her team have been analyzing the links between medication regimen complexity and uncontrolled diabetes among non-Hispanic Black and Latino adults. Their observations were outlined in “Associations between Diabetes-Specific Medication Regimen Complexity and Cardiometabolic Outcomes among Underserved Non-Hispanic Black Adults Living with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus,” published in Pharmacy.
Given that increased diabetes medication regimen complexity, increased medication nonadherence, increased diabetes-related distress, and poor diabetes control have been shown to be connected among adults with type 2 diabetes, Dr. Wisseh’s proposal intends to explore how an approach to diabetes care that considers interpersonal, institutional, policy, and community factors could improve adherence to diabetes self-management activities (such as adhering to one’s medication regimen and monitoring one’s blood glucose) among non-Hispanic Black adults with type 2 diabetes.
“Receiving this award is great encouragement as an early-stage investigator,” Dr. Wisseh shared. “It is also humbling, as I am able to develop and implement an intervention that has the potential to improve diabetes outcomes and adds to the great community-engaged and community-centered research that is already being done in the field of health disparities research.”
