Impact 2020 Report

University Health Services is focused on the health and wellness of the Boise State community with the mission of making Boise State America’s Healthiest Learning Environment.

Health Services was key to keeping our campus safe during the pandemic. Clinicians and counselors, as the frontline to campus health, collaborated with university leadership and the new Boise State Public Health Office to lead in initial COVID testing.

Learn more about Health Services

BroncoFit works to create a healthy campus and transitioned their programming to virtual events during the COVID pandemic. The office also prepared care packages for students who must quarantine in a university residence hall.

Learn more about BroncoFit

Counseling Services were expanded by telehealth to online students in Idaho just as the pandemic hit the state. As most university classes pivoted to virtual, students returned to their off-campus and/or out-of-state residences, and regulatory rules were lifted for the global pandemic. Counseling Services was able to broaden their reach to nearly all students regardless of state lines. The telehealth appointments have been highly utilized with a lower missed appointment rate.

Learn more about Counseling Services

At the onset of the pandemic, Boise State established a Public Health Office to lead the response to the COVID-19 crisis. COHS worked with the public health officers to help keep  our campus safe for students, employees and visitors. At the start of the Fall 2020 semester, five COHS undergraduate students joined our Public Health Office’s contact tracing team. The students stepped up quickly to efficiently meet the growing campus need to determine where those who became exposed or infected with COVID may have come in contact with it.

The duties of contact tracers included assessing the need for:

• Isolation and quarantine
• Communicating and facilitating the separation of infectious and exposed individuals from campus and other people
• Connecting with campus resources

These 5 COHS students helped grow the team to 25 in just a few months by:

• Creating interview process
• Developing training material
• Training new staff

Students Helping Students

These students provided a unique ability to connect and relate to their peers who were struggling to deal with COVID-19. The success of this group also led to more opportunities for COHS students and graduates. One of the original five students was hired full-time after graduating in December 2020. Two additional COHS graduates and two undergraduate students have also been hired to join the Public Health Office’s contact tracing team.

Learn more about the university’s COVID response.

COVID-19 forced faculty and administrators to find new ways to provide experiential learning to students. The College of Health Sciences provides two broad types of experiential learning – clinical, including simulation, and non-clinical internships. Both had to quickly pivot in spring 2020 to keep students on track for graduation.

The College of Health Sciences provides hands on clinical learning experiences through partnerships with healthcare providers across the country. In order to succeed, students must be able to practice what they’ve learned in the classroom in a real world setting while being supervised by an experienced practitioner. These practitioners, in partnership with the university, assist the student by setting expectations, providing effective feedback and appropriate opportunities to meet learning objectives.

“The radiologic sciences program does an amazing job preparing its students for the clinical environment. Once in the clinical environment the professors, clinical instructors, critique instructors, and technologists around the Treasure Valley work hard to create a positive learning environment for the students. It’s where I get to integrate all the knowledge I have gained and apply it to my practice today and in the future.”Sierra Blanke, Bachelor of Science in Radiologic Sciences Student

Clinical Programs:

• Athletic Training
• Nursing
• Radiologic Sciences
• Respiratory Care
• Social Work
• Genetic Counseling

Clinical Impact:

• • 80 classes
  • 2,525 students
  • 458,031 total hours of clinical/field placements

Clinical and fieldwork experiences became a particular challenge as community partners needed to limit the number of extra people in their facilities and to address the shortage of personal protection equipment. Local health system partners worked with our leadership to adapt ho training facilities can be done safely, effectively, efficiently, and without drawing down their precious PPE inventories.

The ability to increase simulation clinical hours to compensate for reduced bedside clinic hours is crucial to help keep students on-track to graduate on time. As a stop-gap measure, nursing faculty and staff filmed skills simulation over the summer for remote clinical learning as a way to add safe simulation experiences for students to accumulate clinical hours.

“Clinical simulations have provided RT students with scenarios and a place to safely practice focused goals, as well as the opportunity to apply our knowledge, learn technique and build confidence.” Jory Reynolds, Bachelor of Science in Respiratory Care Student

Learn more about our Simulation Center.

Clinicals are provided through affiliation agreements. Total number of agreements in Idaho and Nationwide.

• Genetic Counseling: 45
• Kinesiology: 22
• Respiratory Care: 14
• Health Services: 12
• Social Work: 943
• Nursing: 275

There are a total of 1819 students enrolled in COHS Online Programs. View accessible image data.

In response to Idaho Governor Brad Little’s goal to increase value-based healthcare payment contracts by 2023, the college created the Value-Based Healthcare Certificate Program. With this program and others, Boise State is becoming Idaho’s go-to resource for innovative payment models and healthcare education, advisory and reform.

Value-based healthcare is a delivery model where providers, including hospitals, clinics and physicians, receive payments based on patient health outcomes and the cost of care. Currently, most Americans receive fee-for-service care, which rewards providers delivering a large volume of services, rather than rewarding the quality of those services. Value-based payment agreements reward providers for helping patients to receive appropriate health screenings, benefits from preventative healthcare, improved health, reduced effects and incidences of chronic diseases, and live, overall, healthier lives.

The goal of value-based healthcare is to provide patients cost-effective care designed to avoid unnecessary services, duplicative testing or more expensive care than is medically necessary.

“This program is a game changer for anyone in healthcare who wants to adapt to the coming changes in delivery and reimbursement, but also get out ahead of it.” Steve LaForte, Director of Corporate Affairs and General Counsel at Cascadia Healthcare and Value-Based Healthcare Certificate Graduate

The Value-Based Healthcare Certificate Program is an innovative professional development program created in partnership with:

• Boise State E-campus
• Center for Professional Development
• College of Health Sciences

First Year Impact on Idaho

60 students in all 7 of Idaho Health Districts will have completed the training.

Learn more about the Value-Based Healthcare Certificate

Boise State’s Master of Social Work online degree is designed to prepare students for advanced social work practice with individuals and families. Students learn clinical, organizational, and policy skills necessary for promoting equality and enhancing the quality of life for all people. Our program provides the flexibility to get a master’s degree while remaining productive in their own community and comfortable in their own environment.

Wayne Brown, Master of Social Work Online Graduate, praised the flexibility of the program, saying, “I graduated from the online masters of social work while living in Montpelier, Idaho. At the same time as I was studying, I worked and took care of my mom who is 93 years old. It was difficult but the flexibility of the online program allowed me to stay at home in rural Idaho while pursuing my degree. Although it was a lot to manage, it allowed me to continue to take care of my mom while continuing my education. My favorite part of the program was working with the other students because even though we were all over the country we came together to learn with one another.”

Learn more about the Master of Social Work Online Program

When students engage in research with faculty, both the students and faculty benefit. Faculty get helpful assistance and students have a whole new world of experiential learning open to them. Students gain not only practical research skills, but an appreciation for the work, time and dedication researchers utilize in order to further our understanding of health, medicine and best practices for better patient care.

Student research positions are robustly funded through state and national grants, university funding, and private donations. Thirty-two students, 18 undergraduate and 14 graduate, held positions in 2020 funded through external grants.

“My research experience has helped me become a responsible consumer of information. I think it’s important to be responsibly disseminating information and it’s so invaluable.”Sarah McKiddy, Bachelor of Science in Nursing Student and Undergraduate Research Assistant

COHS Research Expenditures

2010: $950,000

2016: $2,590,000

2020: $3.9 million

Partnering with St. Luke’s Applied Research

Boise State University and St. Luke’s Applied Research have joined forces to study sport-related concussions in children and youth. They are attempting to identify markers and patterns of physiological recovery that may improve the safety of an athlete’s return to the playing field. Led by Department of Radiological Sciences faculty member Leslie Kendrick and St. Luke’s Concussion Clinic physician, Kurt Nilsson, the team is using a combination of MRI brain imaging and blood markers to assist in determining recuperation time.

National Institutes of Health Grants

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the largest biomedical research agency in the world. In 2020, we have four prestigious NIH grants:

Nate Williams:

• ($1,885,153) Randomized trial of a leadership and organizational change strategy to improve the implementation and sustainment of digital measurement-based care in youth mental health services (Project WISDOM)
• ($420,556) Generating Accurate Estimates of Required Sample Size for Multilevel Implementation Studies in Mental Health

Cynthia Curl:

• ($457,537) Measurement of Agricultural and Dietary Glyphosate Exposure Among Pregnant Women

Tyler Brown (Co-Investigator)

• ($111,694) Musculoskeletal adaptation of young and older adults in response to environmental, physical, and cognitive conditions.