Population Health

January 5, 2023

New foundation funding to help UW faculty members mitigate effects of racism on health

Image of a stethoscope and a smart phoneTwo University of Washington faculty members, Weichao Yuwen and Maggie Ramirez, have received a $50,000 grant from the Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation’s Emergent Innovation program to narrow gaps in health equity.

Yuwen and Ramirez’s project, “AI-Enhanced Nursing Intervention Platform for Latino Family Caregivers,” seeks to tailor an existing artificial intelligence platform – Caring for Caregivers Online, or COCO – to offer culturally-congruent support to caregivers of children with chronic conditions.

“Despite overwhelming and disparate needs, the use of supportive healthcare programs is lower among Latino caregivers, in large part due to a lack of accessible and culturally and linguistically appropriate care,” said Yuwen. “Latino communities are more likely than other racial and ethnic groups to seek health information using mobile devices, suggesting that technology-enabled tools delivered through mobile applications are well-poised to unlock new models of supportive care.”

Yuwen and Ramirez were previously awarded a Population Health Initiative pilot research grant in March 2019 for their project CocoBot – Tailored Self-Management Program for Caregivers of Children with Chronic Conditions.

“The initial COCO pilot project was funded by PHI in 2018, which allowed us to develop a transdisciplinary team of faculty and students to explore innovative solutions to support family caregivers,” Yuwen shared. “Last year, we received a Tier 1 pilot to conduct a literature review and secondary analysis of our existing data to explore multicultural and multilingual approaches to adapt health interventions, which laid a strong foundation that led to this current award by the Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation.”

Yuwen is an assistant professor of Nursing & Healthcare Leadership at UW Tacoma. Her research interests include healthcare and family research to promote technology-enabled health solutions for family caregivers.

Ramirez is an assistant professor in the School of Public Health. Her research interests revolve around studying how to design, implement and evaluate health information technology to accelerate the adoption of evidence-based care for elderly Latinos and their family caregivers.