The purpose of this project is to expand respiratory therapy and registered nursing workforce capacity in Kansas Health Professional Shortage Areas, focusing especially on building skills to treat people with chronic respiratory diseases and Long-COVID. The I-CAN will focus on increasing skills in the rural health care workforce in Kansas by delivering a combination of didactic and clinical experiences centered on evidence-based pulmonary rehabilitation principles.

Further, the I-CAN community-based approach supports our effort to investigate the feasibility of a novel hybrid pulmonary rehabilitation program that can be translatable to every day clinical practice.

The I-CAN projects are funded by a Health Resources and Services Administration grant, award number 6 TR1RH45932‐01‐01; Dave Burnett, Ph.D., RRT, principal investigator.

Our I-CAN team has helped develop a collaborative group of rural stakeholders (educators, clinicians, payers, policy makers, professional organizations, and patients). Collectively, the I-CAN will focus on increasing access to specialized pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) services in rural communities. Although PR is a standard of care for chronic respiratory disease (CRD), only 4% of Medicare beneficiaries with CRD in the US indicate participating in PR. There is a rural health disparity gap that affects people with CRD. CRD is twice as prevalent in rural versus urban areas, however, rural communities have half the number PR programs per capita compared to urban areas.  

Want to learn more or interested in collaborating? Please contact us 913-588-5235, healthprofessions@kumc.edu.