Update
APCRF Update April 2025
Our fellowship is coming up on its final year of this 5-year T32 funding period (July 1, 2021-June 30, 2026). The uncertainty surrounding the change in political administration had raised some concerns – our HRSA T32 funder has been merged with other federal agencies into the new “Administration for a Healthy America” (AHA). This merger raised concerns about whether another 5-year Primary Care Research Fellowship T32 renewal opportunity would come forth. However, we received great news in April 2025 from our Program Officer that AHA still plans to release a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) in Fall 2025 for another 5-year cycle of T32 funding from July 2026-June 2031. Our leadership team is thrilled with this news and is already considering strategic elements to include in a renewal application, such as our outstanding fellows’ accomplishments to date (100% of graduates to date have obtained tenure-track faculty positions) and the dedication of ACCORDS and our primary care Divisions/Departments to support the mentors who train our fellows.
An exciting new addition to APCRF that we will also feature in a renewal application is a new mini-course to further support our fellows’ technical writing skills. Based on feedback from fellows and mentors on the importance of these skills for academic success, we developed and launched a pilot technical writing mini-course in Spring 2025. The leader of this mini-course is the original founder of our Primary Care Research Fellowship who launched it back in 1990 – Dr. John Steiner. It includes a series of seven small group sessions to receive didactic training on writing a manuscript – this focus was chosen as there is already a grant-writing workshop for APCRF and its sibling fellowship for sub-specialists, surgeons and hospitalists (SCORE), but nothing focused as in-depth on manuscripts as we would have like. Each didactic session in the new technical writing mini-course focuses on a different section of the manuscript. The didactic sessions are followed by an applied workshop session where the group works together during class to edit one of the fellow’s writings. Fellows from both the APCRF and the SCORE Fellowship have participated. The last two sessions of this pilot writing workshop are open to a broader group of fellows as well as program faculty who want to discuss the considerations “from soup to nuts” of planning a series of manuscripts for a given project – including negotiating authorship roles and planning a timeline. These last two sessions will also include other timely topics suggested by the fellows, such as emerging journal standards on the use of graphical abstracts and Artificial Intelligence.
Our fellows have continued to thrive throughout this uncertain time – they have shown exemplary resilience and productivity in terms of carrying out their fellowship projects, writing grants and manuscripts, and presenting at national meetings. In addition, three of our six fellows will have submitted career development applications by June 30, 2025. To support our fellows in navigating their next steps after completion of T32 training, we added more career networking opportunities for our fellows with faculty and program alumni. Our fellows had asked for these types of sessions to learn about potential career opportunities, to identify additional research mentors/collaborators, and to strengthen connections with peers in both the ACCORDS and SCORE programs.
Further, we recruited for and selected our 9th fellow who will start the APCRF program in July 2025. This recruitment allowed us to exceed our target to enroll at least 8 fellows over the current 5-year funding cycle. Overall, our program continues to meet the targets of preparing an outstanding primary care research workforce, as we envisioned in our original grant application.
As mentioned above, we will submit a grant to renew our T32 funding for a 2026 start date - depending on the terms of the grant, that start date could range between July-September 2026. The Program Manager continues to collect a list of interested prospective candidates. If you or someone you know might be interested in the fellowship 2026 start date, they should reach out to our Program Manager (Rebecca Speer, MA Rebecca.Speer@cuanschutz.edu) so we can update you when recruitment begins. Please also feel free to reach out with questions to the APCRF Program Director (Dr. Amy Huebschmann (Amy.Huebschmann@cuanschutz.edu).
APCRF Update January 2025
The goal of the ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship (APCRF) is to train post-doctoral professionals to become primary care research leaders addressing the nation’s primary care health delivery challenges. The APCRF is a T32 training program that benefits from a collaborative training effort between the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus (CU-AMC) and two affiliated institutions: Kaiser Permanente of Colorado (KPCO) and Denver Health (DH).
The fellowship was initially founded in 1988 by Dr. John Steiner. Dr. Amy Huebschmann took over as PI and Program Director for this T32 in June of 2024, and is excited to lead the program forward with the assistance of four mentors/Co-Directors: Drs. Allison Kempe, Russ Glasgow, Liz Bayliss and Romana Hasnain-Wynia. The APCRF provides post-doctoral training to MD and PhD fellows with funding from Departmental sponsors of fellows to supplement fellow stipends from the HRSA Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Institutional T32 Research Training Grant. Notable alumni from the fellowship span our Divisions of Family Medicine, General Internal Medicine, Geriatrics and Pediatrics, and include many leaders on our medical campus and across the country: Drs. Jean Kutner (UCHealth Chief Academic Officer), Sean O’Leary (Director of the COCONet Practice-Based Research Network), Lisa Schilling (Vice Chair for Research for General Internal Medicine), Dan Matlock (Director - ACCORDS Shared Decision-Making Core), Mandy Allison (Director of the Nurse Family Partnership and Prevention Research Center), Jamie Feinstein (Director of the Clinical Faculty Scholars Program), Anne Nederveld (Director of the PEACHnet Practice-Based Research Network), and many others.
Our currently enrolled APCRF T32 fellows are Drs. J. Kyle Haws (Psychiatry), David Higgins (Pediatrics), Michael Mattiucci (Pediatrics), Josh Cockroft (Psychiatry) and Emily Dunston (General Internal Medicine). The projects led by our current fellows reflect the breadth of research needs in primary care:
Vaccine hesitancy
Screening/referral for unmet social needs in pediatric clinics
Brief mental health interventions for youth in primary care
Evidence-based exercise/rehabilitation programs for cancer survivors
Implementing tobacco cessation services tailored to individuals with severe and persistent mental illness.
Dr. Huebschmann will submit a T32 renewal application in Fall 2025 for another 5-year cycle of funding to begin in July of 2026. We plan to continue recruiting fellows while awaiting our notice of award for the new 5-year cycle and are working with Departments to encumber funds to sponsor fellows in this period. We are in the process of finalizing our fellow to begin in July 2025, but if you know of a candidate who might be interested in the fellowship for a July 2025 or July 2026 start date, they can learn more about the program by visiting our website HERE and/or reach out to Dr. Huebschmann (Amy.Huebschmann@cuanschutz.edu ) or the APCRF program manager (Rebecca Speer, MA) with any questions: Rebecca.Speer@cuanschutz.edu
APCRF Update October 2024
The ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship (APCRF), funded with a HRSA Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Institutional Research Training Grant, is a collaborative training program between the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and affiliated institutions Kaiser Permanente of Colorado and Denver Health. The goal of the Fellowship is to train post-doctoral professionals to become primary care research leaders addressing the nation’s primary care health delivery challenges.
In our last update, we wrote about celebrating our second and third fellowship graduates (Hannah Friedman, MD, MPH and Elena Broaddus, PhD) since the program was revamped with a HRSA grant in the summer of 2022. We held a celebration on July 8th at TStreet on the first floor of the Anschutz Health and Sciences building where both graduates were awarded with a certificate of completion and a couple of small gifts from the Fellowship team. Dr. Friedman finished the program at the end of June, and Dr. Broaddus completed the fellowship at the end of August. Because Dr. Broaddus began Fellowship as one of two fellows in our initial HRSA-funded cohort, we are missing her presence and her invaluable contributions. Below, we share a little bit about her research, what she accomplished during our program, and her next steps:
Elena Broaddus, PhD, MSPH graduated from the ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship on August 31st, 2024. Her primary fellowship research project focused on understanding patient perspectives on screening for health-related social needs in primary care settings. She presented her work at several national conferences and published her findings in Patient Education and Counseling. During her fellowship, Dr. Broaddus also obtained a Graduate Certificate in Dissemination and Implementation Science from the University of Colorado Adult and Child Center for Health Outcomes Research and Delivery Science (ACCORDS) and completed training in advanced methods for mixed-methods data analysis, including Qualitative Comparative Analysis and Coincidence Analysis. She will be continuing in a faculty position in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado in the fall of 2024 and will be playing a lead methodologist role on team science projects, as well as pursuing independent research in the area of health-related social needs.
Congratulations to our third exceptional APCRF graduate, Dr. Elena Broaddus! We are proud of her accomplishments, and are hoping she will attend a transitioning-from-fellowship event we are planning for the spring of 2025 to discuss her experience post-fellowship with our currently-enrolled trainees.
To learn more about the program, please reach out to the APCRF program manager (Rebecca Speer, MA) with any questions: Rebecca.Speer@cuanschutz.edu
APCRF Update July 2024
The ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship (APCRF), funded with a HRSA Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Institutional Research Training Grant, is a collaborative training program between the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus (CU-AMC) and affiliated institutions Kaiser Permanente of Colorado (KPCO) and Denver Health (DH). The goal of the Fellowship is to train post-doctoral professionals to become primary care research leaders addressing the nation’s primary care health delivery challenges.
After orientation on July 8th, our fellowship held a celebration at TStreet on the first floor of the Anschutz Health and Sciences Building to welcome our two new first year fellows, Joshua Cockroft, MD, and Emily Dunston, MS, and to celebrate the graduation of our second fellow to date since the program was revamped in the summer of 2022: Hannah Friedman, MD, MPH. The Program Director, Amy Huebschmann, MD, awarded each with a certificate of completion and a couple small gifts from the Fellowship team. In this update, we spotlight the research work and next steps for our recent graduate, Dr. Friedman.
Hannah Friedman, MD, MPH, graduated from the ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship on June 30th, 2024. Her primary fellowship research project focused on understanding factors that impact health care transition for adolescents and young adults with medical complexity. She presented her work at several national conferences and was awarded the Academic Pediatric Association Fellow Research Award at the 2024 Pediatric Academic Societies annual research meeting. During her fellowship, she also obtained a Master of Public Health with a concentration in Epidemiology from the University of Colorado School of Public Health. She has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado. She will work both in the section of General Pediatrics providing primary care to children with medical complexity at the Special Care Clinic and in the section of Hospital Medicine. She hopes to continue her research on health care transition with the goal of optimizing this process for adolescents and young adults with medical complexity.
Congratulations to Dr. Friedman! We are proud of you and all you have accomplished!
To learn more about the program, please reach out to the APCRF program manager (Rebecca Speer, MA) with any questions: Rebecca.Speer@cuanschutz.edu
APCRF Newsletter Update April 2024
The HRSA-funded ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship (APCRF) proudly announces that effective June 1, 2024, Amy Huebschmann, MD, MS, FACP, FSBM will take over the Fellowship Program Director role from our current Director, Allison Kempe, MD, MPH, who has begun a phased retirement. Dr. Huebschmann is a highly qualified researcher, talented clinician scientist and superb mentor, and Drs. Kempe and Huebschmann have a long history of working together. Dr. Huebschmann is also a subject expert in Dissemination and Implementation science, which is crucial to our fellows’ program training. Further, as the grant will complete its third of five years of funding from HRSA at the end of the current fiscal year, Dr. Kempe felt that this role transition would afford Dr. Huebschmann ample time to demonstrate effective leadership to HRSA before the Fellowship reapplies for another five years of funding to begin in July of 2026. Dr. Kempe will remain on the APCRF as one of our Co-Directors.
Dr. Amy Huebschmann has been approved for promotion to Full Professor effective July 1, 2024, within the Department of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine. She also serves as a senior physician-scientist investigator within ACCORDS and the Ludeman Family Center for Women’s Health Research. As a primary care physician and scientist, Dr. Huebschmann’s career objective is to improve health by leveraging Dissemination and Implementation science methods to tailor evidence-based interventions to real-world settings with attention to health equity. To accomplish this objective, she has focused on interventions that promote patient education and individual behavior change to better manage or prevent chronic disease. Dr. Huebschmann has in-depth knowledge and experience implementing these types of programs in clinical care and community settings in such diverse content areas as physical activity coaching for type 2 diabetes mellitus, overcoming clinical inertia for hypertension management, and implementing effective school-based asthma management programs in communities with high poverty rates. Training and mentoring scientists is also a major career goal for Dr. Huebschmann, as evidenced by her teaching and mentoring record, including her Co-Director roles on both the APCRF and the previously NHLBI-funded K12 Dissemination and Implementation Science Training Program. In addition, in 2019, Dr. Huebschmann founded the University of Colorado Graduate Certificate in Implementation Science to train the next generation of scholars in implementation science methods.
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Amy Huebschmann on her new role as the Program Director of the ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship! It has been an honor for Dr. Kempe to serve in this role on the Fellowship for the past three years, and she and the Fellowship’s other Co-Directors are confident and excited about Dr. Huebschmann taking the helm this coming June.
APCRF Newsletter Update January 2024
The ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship (APCRF), funded with a HRSA Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Institutional Research Training Grant, is a collaborative training program between the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and affiliated institutions Kaiser Permanente of Colorado and Denver Health. The goal of the Fellowship is to train post-doctoral professionals to become primary care research leaders addressing the nation’s primary care health delivery challenges. Toward the end of the summer, we recruited our fourth and final cohort on the five-year grant. We are proud and pleased to introduce our two new fellows who will start the program in July of 2024:
Josh Cockroft, MD, is boarded in both family medicine and psychiatry and has a strong interest in health services and implementation science research. He grew up in Colorado before attending college in the Philadelphia area, medical school at Vanderbilt University, and will complete his combined FM/Psychiatry residency at the University of Cincinnati before the starting as an ACCORDS Primary Care Fellow. His research background includes psychometric instrument validation, examining the role of trust in healthcare for women with a history of substance use disorders, implementation evaluation of a remote behavioral health training in a global health setting, and evaluation of novel models in and technology used for behavioral health consultation in an inpatient setting. His longer-term research interest is focused on the optimization of primary and preventive care delivery for individuals with severe mental illness and reduction of health disparities in this population.
Emily Dunston, MS, will complete her PhD in Health and Kinesiology at the University of Utah with a graduate certificate in Gerontology before beginning the ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship this summer. Emily’s doctoral training focused on exercise across the cancer care continuum, particularly among older adults with cancer. Her current research interests are centered around the delivery of physical activity programs for people living with cancer and other chronic diseases in the primary care setting. Through the ACCORDS primary care research fellowship, she aims to gain expertise in dissemination and implementation science methodologies and to explore the integration of physical activity interventions into clinical healthcare settings.
Congratulations to Drs. Josh Cockroft and Emily Dunston!
HRSA has informed us that they expect us to be able to reapply for another five years of funding in 2025. If refunded, we intend to do our next round of recruitment for another two to three fellows in the summer of 2026. To learn more about the program, please visit our website HERE and please share within your professional network. If you or a colleague of yours would be interested in applying for a future cohort, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the APCRF program manager (Rebecca Speer, MA) with any questions or to express interest in being notified if we are able to secure an additional five years of funding: Rebecca.Speer@cuanschutz.edu
APCRF Newsletter Update October 2023
The ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship (APCRF), funded with a HRSA Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Institutional Research Training Grant, is a collaborative training program between the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus (CU-AMC) and affiliated institutions Kaiser Permanente of Colorado (KPCO) and Denver Health (DH). The goal of the Fellowship is to train post-doctoral professionals to become primary care research leaders addressing the nation’s primary care health delivery challenges.
The fellowship onboarded its first cohort late August of 2021, and proudly announces our first graduate from the program, Andrea Jimenez-Zambrano, PhD, MPH, who finished fellowship on June 30th, 2023. She finished fellowship two months early to be a Methodologist within the Mixed-methods and Qualitative Core at ACCORDS and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics. She had quite a productive fellowship experience, obtaining a Certificate in Dissemination and Implementation Science and conducting a research project that involved interviews with the parents of asthmatic children living in rural Colorado. Specifically, her research project’s goal aimed to understand in-depth which barriers and facilitators might influence Latinx family’s engagement with the Col-SBAP program for improving asthma management and behaviors and identify possible adaptations to the program to ensure accessibility, acceptability and cultural responsiveness that would support Latinx family engagement. During her 22 months in fellowship, she published seven manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals and had eight conference presentations on research work collaborations. Her primary research interest is addressing health inequities in primary care through research that enhances the health and well-being of Spanish-speaking populations.
Over the summer, the fellowship also onboarded its third cohort. We are proud and pleased to introduce our two new fellows who started the program in July whom we introduce below:
David Higgins, MD, MPH, MS is a pediatrician, preventive medicine physician, and physician-researcher. His experience as a community pediatrician led him into population health research at the Colorado School of Public Health where he completed a second residency in Public Health and Preventive Medicine. His research focuses on improving vaccine delivery and confidence in the primary care setting. Through the ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship, he aims to further develop skills in delivery science, community-based participatory research, and pragmatic clinical trials to reduce the burden of vaccine-preventable diseases and improve the health of children, adolescents, and their communities.
Michael Mattiucci, MD, MPH is an instructor fellow in the department of Pediatrics and a primary care pediatrician at the Child Health Clinic in Aurora, CO. He grew up in Rochester, NY and attended medical school at the University of Rochester before moving to Colorado for pediatric residency at the University of Colorado. As an ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellow, he will focus on studying interventions to improve social determinants of health in clinical and community settings, and improving community engagement in primary care delivery and health services research.
Congratulations to Drs. Andrea Jimenez-Zambrano, David Higgins and Michael Mattiucci!
To learn more about the program, please visit our website HERE and/or don’t hesitate to reach out to the APCRF program manager (Rebecca Speer, MA) with any questions: Rebecca.Speer@cuanschutz.edu
APCRF Newsletter Update for September of 2022
The ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship (APCRF), funded with a HRSA Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Institutional Research Training Grant from July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2026, is a collaborative training program between the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus (CU-AMC) and affiliated institutions Kaiser Permanente of Colorado (KPCO) and Denver Health (DH). The goal of the Fellowship is to train post-doctoral professionals to become primary care research leaders addressing the nation’s primary care health delivery challenges.
Since we received notice of being funded in June of last year, the fellowship’s faculty and staff have been quite busy and productive with our recruitment efforts over that time. We now have four trainees total participating in the program: two first year fellows (Hannah Friedman, MD and James [Kyle] Haws, PhD) who in July of this year joined our now second year scholars (Elena Broaddus, PhD and Andrea Jimenez-Zambrano, PhD, MPH). While onboarding and orienting our new trainees over the summer, we were also able to recruit and offer two additional positions to two MD candidates who will begin fellowship in July of next year. Needless to say, it’s been a hectic 15 months and we are very proud of the quality and potential of the trainees we have recruited to date and all that our team has accomplished in our first year alone!
In particular, we’d like to highlight what our two second years, Drs. Broaddus and Jimenez-Zambrano accomplished during their first ten months in the program. These two outstanding fellows were able to collectively publish 11 articles in peer-reviewed journals, two of which were first-author manuscripts. In addition, they collectively gave 7 presentations at national conferences.
Both fellows also made substantial headway on the primary research projects. Dr. Broaddus’ project examines factors predicting interest in assistance with health-related social needs (HRSN) among western Colorado primary care patients, in light of the fact that many patients decline assistance with HSRN and the reasons are not well understood. She is also developing a second research project that examines care adjustments for patients with diabetes and HRSN through an implementation science lens that seeks to clarify which specific domains of disease management should be adjusted and how to ensure that adjustment does not inadvertently increase disparities in care and outcomes. Dr. Jimenez-Zambrano’s primary project explores factors to tailor the Col-SBAP program, which focuses on improving asthma management skills and behaviors, reducing emergency department visits, and decreasing the number of missed school days among low-income and racial/ethnic minority students, as well as addressing social determinants of health as major drivers of asthma disparities. As this program scales out to different geopolitical areas in Colorado, her project homes in specifically on the program’s tailoring for acceptability and cultural responsiveness of Latinx families living in rural and smaller metropolitan areas of the state.
Congratulations to Drs. Elena Broaddus and Andrea Jimenez-Zambrano
on all your success in the first year of the APCRF; you make us proud!
To learn more about the APCRF program, please visit our website HERE. If you or a colleague of yours would be interested in applying, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the APCRF program manager (Rebecca Speer, MA) with any questions about the fellowship prior to our recruitment efforts commencing again this spring: Rebecca.Speer@cuanschutz.edu