Southern Oregon
Lynda Daniel - OHSU Community Research Liaison
Lynda is located in Klamath Falls. Her region includes Klamath and Lake counties.
If you would like to contact Lynda, please email crockerd@ohsu.edu
Lynda's role on the Community Engaged Research Team:
- Collaborate with community partners to identify areas of need and opportunities for research related support to move initiatives forward that will improve the overall health and wellness of people living in Klamath and Lake Counties.
- Connect community members and organizations to expertise and research resources, including opportunities to work with academic partners, funding opportunities and assistance with program evaluation.
- Work as an integral member of the OHSU Campus for Rural Health team in Klamath Falls
- Support OHSU academic collaborators by engaging stakeholders and community members.
- Provide county level data and knowledge about the region, facilitate partnerships and projects, and data collection (e.g. focus groups, interviews, surveys)
- Collaborate with OHSU faculty and healthcare providers to build and support relationships and research with the Klamath Tribes (Klamath Tribal Health and Family Services) and support the work of local faculty and providers working with the Northwest Native American Center of Excellence.
Project snapshot
Live Young Weight Management Program
Klamath Falls is a rural community with an under-served population of 21,000, with most residents living outside of city limits. This is a diverse community with Hispanic residents, Asian residents, a growing Middle Eastern population, as well as the home of the Klamath Tribes. The city itself is referred to as the City of Sunshine and affords great walkability/biking and green spaces. Klamath Falls offers its residents many luxuries for a small town such as a multitude of great coffee shops, entertainment venues like the Ross Ragland, and nature trails and parks within walking distance from downtown.
Live Young Sky Lakes Wellness Center clinic is in downtown Klamath Falls, about 10 minutes by car to the Oregon Institute of Technology and Sky Lakes Medical Center campus. This multidisciplinary clinic opened in March of 2015 and is comprised of a physician, dietitian, therapist, fitness instructors, and administrative assistants who work together to prevent and reverse chronic diseases and obesity in Klamath Falls. All Wellness Center services are available to the community and include:
- Weight Management Program – one-year multi-disciplinary program (must meet requirements)
- Diabetes Prevention Program (must meet requirements)
- Body Acceptance Yoga, Circuit-Weight Training and water aerobics classes
- Mindful Meals Cooking Classes
- Increase Joy Decrease Stress classes
- Body Composition Analysis
- Live Young Sky Lakes Wellness Center
- Katherine Jochim Pope, Live Young Sky Lakes Wellness Center Program Director
- Lynda Crocker Daniel, OHSU Community Research Liaison
Sky Lakes Wellness Center offers an innovative weight management program in Klamath Falls. The Wellness Center collected a large volume of patient data, but did not have the skills or formatted data to even begin analyzing. While they had gathered many patient success stories and anecdotal confirmation they were not able to illustrate with data the program effectiveness.
This partnership also involved Oregon Institute of Technology (OIT) student externs in Public Health Management who entered all data from paper files into the data capture platform called REDCap. OHSU interns then worked to create a data dictionary and perform data analysis to determine if the program was meeting its goals.
Primary goals: Participants will demonstrate 5-10% weight loss by 6 months. Participants will maintain weight loss for 1 year.
Secondary goals: Decrease number of weight-related medications, HgbA1C, LDL, triglycerides, blood pressure, fat percentage, waist circumference, amount of red/processed meat, depression scores, and anxiety scores; increase HDL; and improve self-efficacy scores.
Understanding where the program is successful (and where it is not) is important to inform how the program moves forward and helps move the needle on health outcomes in Klamath Falls.
This project was key in helping SkyLakes build organizational capacity to conduct program evaluation.
Two contiguously-assigned Dietetic Interns rotating through OHSU’s Community Research Hub reviewed the literature behind weight management programs and determined how other weight management programs analyze their effectiveness. They proposed an analysis plan approach to preceptor (and stakeholder), completed a weight management program descriptive analyses, and documented and presented the results of analyses. The Wellness Center did not have staff capacity for this, and it would have taken significantly more time to complete without the support of the OHSU Community Research Hub and student interns.
OHSU helped move the project forward and built organizational capacity (implementation of REDCap at Sky Lakes).
OHSU interns created a data dictionary and analyzed approximately 100 patient records from the first year of the Weight Management Project.
Moving forward, more data needs to be entered into REDCap (by OIT student externs) for future analysis by OHSU student interns to determine program effectiveness. The long-term goal to is to publish results, OHSU intern help and support for publication is welcome and encouraged. In the future, we hope to have OHSU MPH intern(s) in Klamath Falls to work on this project onsite at the Wellness Center.
