Whole Communities–Whole Health

A new app developed by a team of students and researchers at the University of Texas at Austin could soon help minimize the spread of the COVID-19 on campus. Whole Communities–Whole Health researchers are part of the team that helped build the app.

The app, called Protect Texas Together, will allow people to track their symptoms, record COVID-19 test results, get connected to medical resources and — potentially, in the future — even assist in contact tracing.

As UT students prepare to go back to school this fall during the COVID-19 pandemic, an app developed by students and Dell Medical School is looking to make that process run a little more smoothly. The app started as as Whole Communities–Whole Health health app. 

As we feel the effects of COVID-19 in our neighborhoods, Whole Communities–Whole Health wants to share some resources we hope will provide clear information for families during this public health crisis. We have created a website in Spanish and English with links to help you stay healthy, mentally and physically.

“We know that COVID-19 cases are grossly underreported nationally and in Texas. We know that poor communities and black and brown communities always suffer disproportionately, and so if you’re already having trouble accessing health care before the pandemic, it’s not necessarily magically going to open up for you,” said Karen Johnson, an associate professor at the University of Texas School of Nursing.

UT researchers have designed a smart home beacon that gives families feedback in real time. “A lot of diseases are linked to particulate matter in the air, especially indoors, where we spend more than 90% of our time,” says JP Maestre, Ph.D. “It has very relevant health implications.”

“I want to call on my colleagues in nursing education to mount a nationally coordinated effort among nursing programs, professional nursing organizations, and regulatory boards to prepare nursing students (alongside faculty) to step into these [COVID-19 testing and healthcare] roles.”

The sad reality is that states are forced to fill the role of the federal government to coordinate manufacturing, procurement, and distribution of PPE and other medical equipment. This situation is indefensible and will result in unnecessary illness and death, and prolong the crisis.

When parents are under a lot of stress, they have a harder time providing a consistent environment for their children. This leads to a cycle wherein kids act out more than usual, parents have a harder time exercising patience in their responses, and in turn, everyone grows increasingly stressed and unhappy. “Kids do best when the home environment has a high level of warmth and consistency and when parents can be attuned to children’s needs,” Sarah Kate Bearman says.

January is the month for vision-casting, resolution-making, and goal-setting, and our team is already hard at work putting plans in place for the coming year. But before we careen headlong into 2020, we want to take the time to reflect on the past year and appreciate how this grand challenge has grown and evolved since we first launched.

“To be sure, we must protect our rights to make health-related decisions that impact our bodies. To violate our right to bodily autonomy for one type of health decision is to set a dangerous precedent for violating our right to bodily autonomy for other health decisions. But as much as Americans love the narrative of individual liberty and personal responsibility in all realms of life (including health), infectious diseases do not conform to these principles. They lay bare the cold hard reality that humans are interconnected social creatures whose decisions — and germs — impact others.”

“When we limit our thinking about the health of our nation to a conversation about health care, we are missing upwards of 80 percent of the factors that actually contribute to our health. According to the County Health Rankings, only about 20 percent of our health can be credited to access to health care, while 40 percent can be credited to social and economic factors (e.g., employment, income), 30 percent to health behaviors (e.g., sedentary lifestyles, drug and alcohol use), and 10 percent to environmental factors (e.g., safe and accessible sidewalks, air and water pollution),” says School of Nursing and Whole Communities–Whole Health researcher Karen Johnson.

In September’s State of the University Address, President Gregory Fenves announced to faculty, staff, and students that Whole Communities–Whole Health has been selected as UT’s second Bridging Barriers grand challenge.

Researchers from nearly two dozen disciplines have been working for more than a year to build a grand challenge project that produces a new way to study human communities while, at the same time, responding to a critically underserved group in Central Texas: children and families living with adversity.

Faculty members from across the university will work together to explore ways to foster the healthy development of children and families, struggling with adversity, by fundamentally rethinking how cohort studies are conducted on social, behavioral and health issues.

The CENTRAL organizing committee has been very active this year. Following acceptance of our development plan, we got right to work. People have met, gathered, conversed, and had a lot of fun sharing knowledge and ideas about how to make The University of Texas at Austin’s second grand challenge a reality.