The Invest in Nursing grant has had great success over the past three years in the partnership between UNC Chapel Hill School of Nursing and Piedmont Health Services, Inc., with three cohorts of Student Scholars from UNC Chapel Hill, and with three cohorts of Faculty Fellows from across the State of North Carolina. This program is a time-limited grant funded opportunity, provided by the Health Resources and Services Administration, and will no longer continue programming in this current iteration after the 2021-2022 cohort year. It is our hope that other educational entities will use Invest in Nursing as a blueprint for implementing similar programming. Reach Out

Julie Jacobson Vann, PHD, MS, RN

Assistant Professor

Since 1998, Julie Jacobson Vann has worked on systematic literature reviews aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of interventions to improve immunization uptake. These interventions include audit and feedback, patient reminder and recall systems, and provider reminders or clinical decision support tools. She initially served as Project Director of this project and moved into the role of Principal Investigator approximately 12 years ago. Her Cochrane Collaboration systematic literature review and meta-analysis assesses the effectiveness of patient reminder and recall strategies, specifically telephone, letter, postcard, text-message, autodialer, messages through secure patient portals, and combinations of interventions, on increasing vaccination rates. For the past 4.5 years, she has led the third extensive update to the patient reminder and recall systematic review. This update involved screening approximately 5,000 scientific abstracts and fully reviewing more than 300 published articles. This systematic review was published in the Cochrane Library in January 2018.