Jia-Rong Wu
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Medicine & Clinical Research
Heart failure means the heart cannot pump well enough to meet the body's needs, and it requires complex, lifelong medication. Yet 40–60% of patients do not take their medicines as prescribed.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Psychology
- Topics
heart failure
medication adherence
health literacy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Test whether the nurse-delivered FamLit intervention improves medication adherence over 12 months in heart failure patients and their care partners, compared with an attention-control group, in a randomized trial of 164 dyads.
- Compare FamLit and control groups on heart failure hospitalization or all-cause death, quality of life, social support and patient–care partner communication across 12 months.
- Determine whether attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control, drawn from the Theory of Planned Behavior, mediate the intervention's effect on medication adherence.
- Examine whether each dyad member's health literacy, social support and communication moderate FamLit's effect, and use the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model to test how each member's beliefs affect both partners' quality of life.
More about the research
Missed doses lead to poor quality of life, hospital stays and death; up to half of heart failure patients are readmitted within six months of a flare-up, often because of poor adherence. Two factors matter especially: health literacy, a person's ability to understand and use health information, and support from a care partner, usually a family member. Earlier adherence programs produced small improvements that did not last.
Why it matters
Poor medication adherence contributes to roughly 125,000 deaths a year in the United States and drives repeat hospitalizations in heart failure. If FamLit proves efficacious, nurses could use a plain-language, family-centered coaching approach to help patients and their care partners overcome personal barriers and sustain adherence, potentially lowering heart failure hospitalizations and deaths and improving quality of life, particularly for patients with limited health literacy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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Test whether ViCCY, a 10-session video health-coaching program, improves self-care more than web-based health information alone, in a randomized trial of 250 caregivers of hospitalized older adults.
The school
University of Tennessee-Knoxville: 16 labs on PI Pages, $387M a year on research, 426 research doctorates a year.
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