Donna Shelley, MD

Dr. Shelley is motivated by a deep commitment to reducing tobacco-related morbidity and mortality in the US and globally. In pursuit of this goal, she has built a rigorous program of translational, population-based, and policy-relevant research to optimize implementation of tobacco use treatment in health care delivery systems and to develop innovative ways to improve access to and treatment of nicotine addiction among people with comorbid conditions. In the past 8-years her health systems research has expanded to address gaps in quality of care related to cancer and cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk more generally. The questions here research addresses include: “How can we advance the science of implementation to improve adoption of evidence based prevention, treatment and policy interventions? How can principles of implementation science be most effectively applied to optimize adoption of evidence-based CVD and tobacco use treatment guidelines across a wide range of health care settings?”  “What specific technology-driven population and health care system-based interventions will most effectively reduce disparities in access to evidence-based CVD risk prevention and treatment among high-risk and underserved populations?” She is also assessing questions of tobacco policy implementation; most recently with a NCI-funded grant to assess the impact and implementation of the HUD smoke free housing policy in public housing in NYC.

Her record of extramural funding includes awards from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) (the lead federal agency for health services research), and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Currently, she is MPI on two NCI funded grants, one is examining strategies for implementing tobacco use treatment in community health centers in Viet Nam and the other testing the effectiveness and implementation of a range of evidence-based cessation interventions in lung cancer screening programs.  She is also PI of an AHRQ R18 which enrolled over 250 primary care practices to participate in a trial studying the impact of practice facilitation on adoption of a range of practice changes hypothesized to improve adoption and implementation of Million Hearts guidelines for optimizing cardiovascular health. This grant has led to a study funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS), which will develop a valid and pragmatic tool that will identify core features of primary care practices that are related to high performance on quality measures.