We are proud to announce yet another publication that has resulted from RIOS Net projects. The article reports on our tobacco use project in the
Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine (JABFM) in a paper titled "Practice-based assessment of tobacco usage
in Southwestern primary care patients: A Research Involving Outpatient Settings Network (RIOS Net) study". (PDF download) These insights are published in the
March - April 2007 Issue of the JABFM.
The concepts reported in this paper are exciting because this may be the first time a comparison has been done between population-based survey data and New Mexico
primary-care patient data. One important highlight shows that Hispanic women have a higher tobacco usage (25%) than is reflected by information from the
National Health Information Survey of 2003 (12%).
"Our case study examining tobacco use found important differences between the general population-based distribution of a key health risk factor and the distribution of that risk among patients seen in a large group of primary care practices. Our study suggests that the prevalence patterns of smokers seen by primary care providers are likely to be quite different from those of smokers in general population-based samples."
