TAMPA, Fla. -- ​Researchers at the University of South Florida are embarking on a study that hopes to take a step toward making health equity a reality. It will explore how the nationally-recognized Care Transitions Intervention program, or CTI, impacts patients who are members of racial and ethnic minority groups.


What You Need To Know

  • USF researchers studying impact of CTI on minority communities

  • The team plans to hire community members to help with study

  • For more information on CTI, click here

“A lot of the research that’s focused on care transitions interventions have, unfortunately, not been able to recruit enough racial and ethnic minorities into their studies to be able to successfully and confidently say that it works for them," said Dr. Kyaien Conner, an associate professor in USF's dept. of mental health law and policy and the study's principal investigator. 

CTI helps patients and their caregivers transition from the hospital to home by teaching them how to manage chronic illnesses. Conner's team plans to recruit 400 African American, Hispanic, and Latino patients ages 60 and older from Tampa General Hospital, Lakeland Regional, and Advent Health Kissimmee. They're groups that Conner said are at higher risk of being readmitted to the hospital and having negative post-hospital outcomes. They also tend to be more difficult to recruit for studies like this one.

“There’s a long history here, right? Racial and ethnic communities have not always had the greatest relationship with universities, with hospitals, with health care systems in general. So, there’s mistrust there. There’s fear," said Conner. “As providers and as researchers, we have to be empathetic and try to better understand some of those fears and concerns and be a little bit less judgmental when people are saying, ‘Hey, I’m not so comfortable’, or, ‘I’m not so sure about this.’”

Some participants will experience a component added to CTI by researchers that's aimed at making them more comfortable with the program to possibly increase chances of success -- training laypeople from the community to provide motivational interviewing and peer support.

“One of the biggest pushes is the understanding that we can train peers, we can train laypeople in communities in kind of a task-shifting model where we give them an opportunity to be integrated in some of these research projects, integrated on health care teams, because we see that it’s effective and it can help reduce some of the burden on our very overburdened health care system. Also builds capacity in communities where we have laypeople who have access to education and training who are present in community settings who can connect to their community members who may be in need of services and feel more comfortable talking to someone who looks like them," said Conner.

The three-year study is being funded by a $2.5 million grant from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

The team plans to hire community members to help with the study. If you're interested in a position as a care transition coach or peer specialist, contact Dr. Kyaien Conner at (813) 974-7028 or koconner@usf.edu.