March 2023: Chronic Disease Prevention

Posted on January 30, 2023 by Justin B. Moore

Associate Editor Justin B. Moore highlights new articles in the March/April 2023 issue of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice.

The March/April issue of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice contains a number of articles focused on chronic disease prevention, beginning with a compelling commentary by Anthony Zhong and colleagues. In this commentary, Zhong et al make a convincing case that many lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic can be applied to chronic disease to inform screening of diseases such as diabetes and chronic kidney disease. They provide several practical recommendations to support these efforts, with implications for national public health practices.

A related article by Joseph S. Lightner and co-authors evaluates whether and how Community Health Improvement Plans focusing on increasing physical activity are implemented. This study was designed to provide better understand of Community Health Improvement Plan goals, strategies to implement those goals, and the outcomes of those efforts nationally. Their data suggest that communities are choosing easily adopted, appropriate, feasible, and safe interventions but that these strategies may be less effective than alternatives that are more likely to result in large-scale improvements in physical activity behavior. They go on to discuss implications for future public health policies and practices.

Katherine H. Hohman and her team describe implementation, challenges, and lessons learned from the Multi-State Electronic Health Record-based Network for Disease Surveillance (MENDS). A demonstration project, MENDS “aims to improve use of EHR-based chronic disease surveillance data.” The authors describe the potential of MENDS as a useful tool to increase capacity for chronic disease surveillance and present opportunities for the evolution of MENDS as it matures. This article is a must read for those working in chronic disease surveillance at the state, tribal, local, and territorial levels, as MENDS is a novel infrastructure to support the efforts of health departments with the tasks of chronic disease surveillance and population health improvement.

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Author Profile

Justin B. Moore: Justin B. Moore, PhD, MS, FACSM, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Implementation Science in the Division of Public Health Sciences in the Wake Forest School of Medicine at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, NC, USA. He conducts community-engaged research focused on the dissemination and implementation of evidence-based strategies for the promotion of healthy eating and physical activity. He is the Associate Editor for the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice and the Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Translational Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine. Dr. Moore is an active member of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) and the American Public Health Association (APHA). He was named a fellow in the ACSM in 2010 and was a founding member of the Physical Activity Section of the APHA. He later served as the chair of the Physical Activity Section and as the Section’s representative on the APHA Governing Council. In addition to his leadership at the national, state, and local levels, he has published more than 140 peer-reviewed articles and has received funding for his research from the National Institutes of Health, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the de Beaumont Foundation, among others.

Dr. Moore is a graduate of Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi (BS), the University of Mississippi (MS), and the University of Texas at Austin (PhD). He also holds a certificate of competencies in Epidemiology from the University of Michigan School of Public Health.