Aaron Seaman, PhD, Associate in General Internal Medicine, has been awarded a $30,000 American Cancer Society Institutional Research Grant via the Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Seaman’s year-long project, “A Multi-Sited Case Study of Barriers to and Facilitators of Effective Head and Neck Cancer Survivorship Care Guideline Implementation,” could lead to more effective and consistent models of survivorship care.

Under the guidance of mentors Drs. Nitin Pagedar, MD, MPH (Otolaryngology) and Heather Reisinger, PhD (GIM), Dr. Seaman will collect data from the University of Iowa’s head and neck cancer clinic and five other Midwestern locations: University of Kansas, Kansas, KS; University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN; University of Missouri, Columbia, MO; Nebraska Methodist Health System (Methodist Estabrook Cancer Center), Omaha, NE; and Sanford Health, Sioux Falls, SD.

At each site, Dr. Seaman will employ multiple methods of data collection in order to assess how care is provided to survivors of head and neck cancer. Questionnaires, interviews, clinic observation, and evaluation of materials and resources will provide Dr. Seaman’s team with a comprehensive picture and a basis for comparison. “This triangulation of data collection,” Dr. Seaman said, “will illuminate potential gaps between perceived, actual, and ideal care practices at each site.”

As the data accumulates, recommendations for guidelines will have a larger evidence base, and a sense of how existing guidelines are implemented will become clearer. Dr. Seaman hopes to use the resulting data from this next year in support of future federal funding proposals. He will be supported in this current work by Emily Chasco, PhD, a qualitative analyst in the division and Tannaz Saeidzadeh, a graduate student in the College of Nursing, who will serve as project coordinator and secondary analyst.