The Office of Health Initiatives and Disparities Research strives to improve access to health care, quality of health care services, and informs health policy and practice. Our office collaborates with other agencies in the academic, health practice, and lay communities committed to developing health policy initiatives for cancer health disparities including AR House Bill 2781 (2005), AR House Bill 1031 (2009), and AR House Bill 1446 (2019). We provide support to physicians, community health centers, federally qualified health centers, the Arkansas Cancer Coalition, and the American Cancer Society’s innovative approaches to identifying, understanding, and overcoming barriers to the adoption, adaptation, integration, scale-up and sustainability of evidence-based interventions, tools, policies, and guidelines.
Our goal is to develop implementation science research in cancer health disparities, which can incorporate community engagement and principles of implementation science to address cancer disparities in FQHCs.