FOCUS
Ariana is interested in the impact of healthcare deprivation on historically and newly disadvantaged groups. She aims to promote access to quality healthcare by designing evidence-based interventions that integrate affected groups’ perspectives and experiences in order to address existing limitations within social and healthcare systems. Through her personal experiences and clinical exposure, particular issues she hopes to tackle are centered around patient and community empowerment, including: 1) promoting patient health agency, 2) facilitating navigation of complex healthcare systems among low-income, minority, and immigrant groups, and 3) improving suboptimal healthcare and public health communication that can lead to mistrust, healthcare avoidance, and subsequently poor health outcomes. Without these changes, there is an overwhelming amount of preventable suffering. We need compassion and partnership to merge into actionable and evidence-based change to improve our society’s health.
MORE ABOUT ARIANA
After witnessing the many medical and social struggles present among her family and community, Ariana committed herself to a career as a physician-scientist. Through her dual training in medicine and epidemiology, she is focused on promoting self-determination of health and well-being to disadvantaged groups.
DISSERTATION GRANT AWARDEE — FALL 2024
Leveraging Disease Misclassification to Estimate the Impact of Pre-Pregnancy Healthcare Access on Maternal Morbidity
While disparities in healthcare access are recognized as a key issue for achieving health equity, information is missing from our most vulnerable populations who are not accessing any preventive care—without seeing a provider, there is no data, and without data, intervention and action cannot happen. This is especially paramount among those that become pregnant since pregnancy is a medically complex time that can result in a multitude of complications leading to morbidity, and potentially mortality, both of which are disproportionally high among minority and disadvantaged populations. This dissertation will demonstrate an analytic approach to combine information across national surveillance systems to estimate currently unmeasured variables, including pre-pregnancy healthcare access, in order to better understand and highlight necessary changes that need to be made across medical screening guidelines, public health interventions, and existing health policy to reduce adverse pregnancy outcomes and disparities.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE HPRS DISSERTATION AWARDS, CLICK HERE.
