If you are interested in participating in any of the following research studies and would like more information, please email us at keith.sims@unthsc.edu or call us at 817-735-0248.

Research Activities

The Primary Care Research Institute is active in clinical and epidemiological research with a special emphasis in health equity research, mental health, cardiovascular disease and endocrine disorders, HIV/AIDS, and cancer prevention research.

Parker County Health Report, Texas 2012

The Parker County Health Report establishes baseline health characteristics of Parker County, Texas, and was created as a key resource for clinicians and community members to make strategic health decisions for the Parker County community.  State and national data were used to compile this report, providing comparisons between Parker County, Texas, and the United States for a variety of disease mortality and morbidity rates and lifestyle factors such as smoking and obesity.  We encourage you to access the report through the link provided below, and contact us with any questions or concerns.

Parker County Health Report

The GoodNEWS Trial

The GoodNEWS (Genes, Nutrition, Exercise, Wellness, and Spiritual Growth) Program has been active in Dallas, Texas congregations since 2002 and has been pilot tested in African-American congregations throughout South Dallas.  The present study builds on the success of the existing GoodNEWS collaboration, by expanding the program's community-based health maintenance component and connecting it more closely with the medical community.  The GoodNEWS Trial was initiated in 2007 with the following aims:  to assess the effect of a health promotion program combined with a maintenance intervention in African-American congregations, on increasing levels of physical activity and dietary change compared to the health promotion program alone, determine the effect of the health promotion program and maintenance intervention on modifiable cardiovascular risk factors compared to the health promotion program alone and identify individual and group sociodemographic factors associated with increasing and decreasing levels of physical activity and dietary change.  We are gathering evidence to see if it is possible to reduce or prevent disease, through combining faith and health in a collaborative way and supporting one another in creating healthy individuals, congregations, and communities.  (PI:  M DeHaven; Funded by:  NIH/NHLBI Grant #R01 HL087768)

North Texas Participant Registry Project (NRP)

This aims to involve all NorTex clinics to enroll patients into the NRP.  This voluntary project will have front desk personnel hand out 3x5 cards to all patients check in in for their appointments.  This card will have detailed information about the project on one side of the card and collect demographic and medical histories on the other side.  Patients will then give the cards back to the front desk personnel if they decide to participate.  This information will provide NorTex researchers the ability to contact potentially eligible participants for future projects.  We hope to grow this database to 10,000 in the first several years.