GROW-RURAL: A Global to Rural Innovation Network to Adapt Evidence-Based Cardiovascular Interventions to Context

In 2023, CAIRHE began its collaboration as a research partner in the GROW-RURAL project based at the University of Washington (UW), one part of the Rural PRO-CARE ("ReciPROcal Innovations to Improve Cardiovascular CARE in Rural America) rural health equity and research network funded by the American Heart Association and managed by UW. In April 2025, CAIRHE hosted the Rural PRO-CARE annual meeting at MSU in Bozeman.

Beginning in July 2025, CAIRHE will lead Aim 3 of the GROW-RURAL project, including investigators Alex Adams, M.D., Ph.D., CAIRHE director, and Marg Hammersla, Ph.D., of the Mark & Robyn Jones College of Nursing. 

Aim 3 will adapt differentiated service delivery models for cardiovascular disease prevention and test implementation in rural clinical practice. Differentiated service delivery (DSD) is the idea that health care must be delivered by the right people in the right places at the right time to be most effective and efficient. Many DSD models were developed in Africa to provide efficient client-centered HIV care, and may be adapted to CVD prevention care in the rural United States. Other DSD models—such as clinical pharmacist management of hypertension in Black barbershops—developed in U.S. cities, but potential rural correlates of the urban Black barbershop model have not been fully explored. Using a similar human-centered design approach as in Aim 2 of GROW-RURAL, this aim will adapt differentiated service delivery models for evidence-based hypertension care from Uganda and the urban United States to address hypertension in rural WWAMI Region Practice and Research Network (WPRN) practices. The study will test implementation in a Type III hybrid trial with RE-AIM implementation outcomes, with the primary effectiveness outcome being blood pressure (BP) control.