FDA podcast features UH Hilo pharmacy professor on Native Hawaiian clinical trials
As part of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, UH Hilo’s Deborah Taira joined an FDA discussion in the podcast, “Engaging Native Hawaiian Communities in Clinical Trials.”
By Susan Enright.
As part of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, a professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, is featured in a podcast produced by the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Minority Health and Health Equity.
Deborah Taira, along with a colleague of hers at Queen’s Medical Center, Todd Seto, joined a discussion led by the federal office’s Acting Director Christine Lee in the podcast, “Engaging Native Hawaiian Communities in Clinical Trials.” Taira and Seto discuss their research with the Hawaiʻi Health Equity Research and Outreach Network that aims to address and reduce health disparities experienced by Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities.
Professor of Pharmacy Practice Taira is a health economist at UH Hiloʻs Daniel K. Inouye College of Pharmacy and a senior scientist at the Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu. She has extensive experience studying health equity issues for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities and is researching ways to improve access to clinical trials for AA, NHPI, rural, and other communities.
She has published over a hundred peer-reviewed manuscripts related to cost, health outcomes, and health disparities affecting AA and NHPI populations.
In the podcast, Taira says her interest in studying health disparity started long ago with her mother, a professor of nursing who made house calls in elderly housing projects.
“I remember she brought me along with her,” says Taira. “And she said, ‘You can learn more in five minutes when you go into these people’s homes. And you see in their fridge they don’t have any food or the place is filthy or whatever. You learn more about what can help the patient by actually getting to know their life circumstances.'”
Taira says that the people of Hawaiʻi have really good health with the highest life expectancy of any state in the United States.
“However, there’s huge health disparities,” she says. “Unfortunately, Native Hawaiians live about eleven years less than Chinese in Hawaiʻi. That’s a huge disparity, and I just feel like that should not exist now, not in our state of Hawaiʻi. And so, I’m passionate about trying to do what I can to correct that.”
Along with health disparities, Taira’s research also focuses on medication adherence and cost-effectiveness of cardiovascular interventions. She has worked at the Health Institute at the New England Medical Center examining outcomes from the patient perspective and spent ten years working at Hawai‘i Medical Service Association analyzing large administrative datasets, including cost and lab data.
Taira received her master in public affairs with a focus on domestic policy from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and her doctor of science in health economics from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Full podcast and transcript are available online.
Story by Susan Enright, a public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.
