New Research Center Focuses on Health Disparities Solutions

Thomas A. LaVeist, PhD

At a time when the health care professions are being challenged to put more emphasis on fighting racial and ethnic disparities in health rather than simply gathering data about them, two Baltimore-based academic institutions--Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and historically black Morgan State University--have joined forces to establish the appropriately named Center for Health Disparities Solutions.

Funded by a $6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the new center will focus on studying and addressing disparities affecting racial and ethnic groups, urban and rural populations and different socioeconomic classes. These research efforts will be led by principal investigators Thomas A. LaVeist, PhD, associate professor of health policy and management at the Bloomberg School, and Dorothy Browne, PhD, professor of public health and director of the Prevention Sciences Research Center/Drug Abuse Research Program at Morgan State.

The Center will have offices on both campuses, but they will work collaboratively and share facilities and staff. As Browne explains, “This equal partnership combines Morgan’s community-based orientation to practice and research with John Hopkins’ experience in examining the vast array of health disparities locally and nationally. It will take these types of collaborations to reduce and eliminate the myriad of disparities affecting selected communities in Baltimore.”

This best-of-both-worlds approach will enable the Center to develop a mix of programs that balance scientific research with practical, action-based interventions. For example, the Center plans to:

• Establish a summer institute to educate participants from around the country on how to conduct research on health disparities;
• Assist and advise local community-based organizations in creating programs to address disparities;
• Launch a large cohort study to identify precursors of disparities in chronic diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, stroke and heart disease;
• Establish connections with health care advocacy groups to promote its findings.