$2.9 Million NIH Grant Awarded to Professor Chase Raymone and Colleagues

Professor Chase Raymond, who shares a secondary appointment with the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado, Anshutz School of Medicine, and his colleagues from Colombia University’s School of Nursing, Dr. Veronica Barcelona and Dr. Maxim Topaz, have been awarded a $2.9 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant.

Funded by the NIH’s Healthcare and Health Disparities Study Section, the study is titled, “Identifying Stigmatizing Language in Hospital Birthing Care: The ID-STIGMA study.” Dr. Raymond and his colleagues will be researching how stigmatizing language impacts the birthing experience. Using natural language processing (NLP), a data science approach, to identify and analyze documentation patterns, the study will be used to influence institutional change and improve patient outcomes.

First, the study will expand and refine an existing NLP system to identify documentation patterns in obstetric clinical notes. The expanded NLP system will then be applied to examine documentation patterns by patient demographic characteristics. Associations between these patterns and morbidity outcomes for pregnant women and newborns will be used to inform various interventions surrounding documentation practices, policies, and trainings.

Congratulations, Dr. Raymond and fellow researchers!