Improving Heart Health in Manufacturing Communities
Megan McHugh, Ph.D.
Professor of Emergency Medicine
Feinberg School of Medicine
Northwestern University
“Manufacturing workers have historically earned higher wages than similar workers in other industries and are more likely to be offered health insurance. But manufacturing workers tend to be less healthy than workers from other industries. With funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, I’m studying strategies to understand and address this paradox.”
Manufacturing communities have significantly higher rates of smoking, obesity, physical inactivity, diabetes, and cardiovascular deaths, according to Megan McHugh, Ph.D., professor of emergency medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
Dr. McHugh, who is also director of the School’s Manufacturing and Health Research Program, believes that the work environment, lifestyle issues, and in some communities, limited access to healthcare are causing these deficiencies. Dr. McHugh has made it her mission to improve health outcomes in manufacturing communities by implementing strategies that address these issues while also aiming to reduce the cost of care for employers. She began by targeting heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States.
With her AHRQ , Dr. McHugh works directly with large manufacturers. Her project, Healthy Hearts in Manufacturing, aims to improve heart care by implementing proven interventions for high blood pressure and tobacco cessation. Dr. McHugh is partnering with worksite health centers, as many large manufacturers provide health services to employees, spouses, dependents, and retirees through these clinics, particularly in areas with shortages of primary care providers. “Given their potential reach into manufacturing communities, worksite health centers are well-positioned to address healthcare deficiencies,” said Dr. McHugh. Further, “because worksite health centers are funded directly by employers, they’re unencumbered by the usual constraints of the primary care system, providing an opportunity for innovation.”
Dr. McHugh and her team are currently working with these worksite health centers to offer evidence-based interventions drawn from AHRQ’s EvidenceNOW initiative, which provided a blueprint for delivering external support to primary care practices to improve care delivery. Strategies and tools include on-site practice facilitation, health information technology support, and data feedback and benchmarking to deliver quality care and monitor results.
The project has already yielded some early findings. Specifically, worksite health centers have the capacity to accommodate more patients, can bring patients back for routine followups more easily than community-based primary care, and experience less pressure to keep patient visits brief. Preliminary results also suggest lower rates of burnout among worksite health center clinicians, compared to those in community-based primary care.
“A lot of these manufacturing plants are in rural areas, and I think we can use worksite health centers as a natural vehicle to reach manufacturing workers with high rates of chronic illness.” She also believes that “we will learn some things that will benefit efforts to reform community-based primary care to improve patient outcomes while increasing return on investment for employers.”
Principal Investigator: Megan McHugh, Ph.D.
Institution: Northwestern University
Grantee Since: 2023
Type of Grant: R18, Research Dissemination and Implementation Project
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