Month: September 2014

Megan Piper, PhD, has been promoted to associate director of research at UW-CTRI. Dr. Piper is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Department of Medicine. Her research focuses on understanding and treating tobacco dependence, with an additional interest in different populations of smokers who have more difficulty quitting, such as women and smokers with mental illness. …

Could a doctor someday use a smoker’s genetics to tailor treatments? We’re not there yet, but researchers are working on it, if only in the early stages. Dr. Li-Shiun Chen of Washington University in St. Louis is leading a clinical trial, funded by a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, that: UW-CTRI Research …

UW-CTRI Researcher Jessica Cook is a co-author on a published paper concluding that many troops smoke because they believe nicotine will greatly alleviate their post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, when in actuality smoking makes them worse long-term. This misguided belief makes troops with severe PTSD less likely to think they can handle life without cigarettes, …

Bruce Christiansen (left) of UW-CTRI and Douglas Tipperman of SAMHSA Experts from governing entities, advocacy groups, and peer networks convened at the Madison Concourse Hotel to launch a grant project lead by the National Alliance on Mental Illness Wisconsin Chapter (NAMI-WI) to help behavioral health patients to help their peers quit smoking. UW-CTRI is the …

UW-CTRI has partnered to use electronic health records (EHRs) to refer patients who smoke or chew tobacco to the Wisconsin Tobacco Quit Line, and the improvement over traditional referral systems has been significant. In fact, the new eReferral system helped clinicians refer 14% of adult tobacco users, compared to the traditional Fax to Quit system …

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) adopted two of the Joint Commission’s tobacco measures, requiring psychiatric hospitals to report on them or risk a 2% cut in annual CMS payments. The measures include: Inpatient psychiatric hospitals are required to adopt and report on these tobacco performance measures beginning in federal fiscal year 2017. …