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• Focus on prevention •
What can primary care physicians do to help patients overcome their unhealthy behaviors? Practice-based research networks are finding answers to that question through a $5 million initiative.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality have launched a five-year program, Prescription for Health, to identify primary care interventions for these risk factors: sedentary lifestyle, unhealthy diet, tobacco use and risky drinking.
"What makes this project different is that it is all being conducted in practice-based research," says Larry Green, M.D., director of the Robert Graham Center in Washington and director of Prescription for Health at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Denver. "This represents an invitation to family doctors to innovate and develop tools, techniques, strategies and incentives to help patients deal with these four areas."
The first results from the studies may be released in about a year and a half. Prescription for Health will issue a second call for proposals in 2004. For more information, go to http://www.prescriptionforhealth.org/.
FP Report is published by the
AAFP News Department.
Copyright © 2003 by
American Academy of Family Physicians.