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Betty Chewning, PhD

Professor


Dr. Chewning received the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy national Dawson Award for Excellence in Patient Care Research for innovative and impactful Research in the areas of social determinants of health, patient communications, and the medication use experience. Her research, teaching and publications address patient perspectives, shared decision-making, dissemination and implementation studies and comparative effectiveness outcomes. She seeks to improve patient and health care provider communication and patient/ public health outcomes through improved partnerships. She has long engaged diverse stakeholders (American Indian, Latinix, African American, Muslim and underserved rural communities.) As study principal investigator and co-PI she has received over $6 million for her studies.

Dr. Chewning conducts multi-site longitudinal, descriptive and intervention studies to identify how to improve patients' management of their health and regimens.  She and her students have conducted research related to falls, arthritis, diabetes, hypertension, end stage renal disease, and cancer.  Their work addresses 

Sonderegger Research Center

Dr. Chewning is the founding director of the Sonderegger Research Center (SRC), serving for 30 years in that position. The brain child of Joseph Wiederholt, the SRC was the first Social and Administrative Pharmacy research center in the US. With support of the NIH ICTR-CAP, Dr. Chewning and others in the Sonderegger Research Center established the Pharmacy Practice Enhancement and Action Research Link (PEARL Rx), an ongoing collaborative partnership with over 130 pharmacists in Wisconsin.

With her colleagues and graduate students, Dr. Chewning has worked with pharmacists to implement and evaluate pharmacy based interventions. She and her students have also studied a range of issues related to disparities in care, transitions in care, deprescribing and medication reconciliation.

Awards

She and her graduate students have received numerous awards for their research.  Chewning's doctoral students Joanne Peters and Karishma Desai received the 2015 International Conference on Communication in Health Care award for best research abstract. In 2015, along with co-authors and former graduate students Pallavi Patwardhan, PhD and Mohamad Amin, PhD, she received the Best Paper Award of 2014 published in the journal Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy. In 2011, along with former student Beth Martin she as co-author received the Wiederholt Award for best research paper published in JAPhA (coauthored with Beth Martin, PhD and Ruth Bruskewitz, PhD). Her students have received annual awards for best APhA ESAS post-graduate papers in 2010, 2005, and 2003.