Pamela Jo Johnson, MPH, PhD

Education

PhD in Epidemiology, University of Minnesota,

MPH in Community Health Education, University of Minnesota

BA in Sociology, University of Minnesota

Courses

PubH6845: Demographic Data for Policy Analysis (Syllabus) [Spr '06, Spr '07, Spr '08, Spr '09]
PubH6811: Health Disparities Research: Measures, Methods, and Data (Syllabus)

Spring 2009
PUBH6845: Demographic Data for Policy Analysis

Fall 2010
PUBH6811: Health Disparities Research: Measures, Methods, and Data

Research Interests

Dr. Johnson is an epidemiologist and health survey methodologist with broad interests in health services epidemiology and population health focusing on social disparities in health and healthcare. Her work emphasizes methodological issues in health disparities research; access to healthcare and healthcare equity; integrative healthcare; and American Indian/Alaska Native health. She teaches analysis of complex survey data and research methods for disparities researchers. Current university collaborations include: prenatal employment and maternity care choices, the Tribal Tobacco Use Project (TTUP), and exploratory work on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use by race, ethnic and immigrant populations.

Dr. Johnson has expertise in the use of population health and demographic data for health research. She has extensive knowledge and experience with national vital records data (natality and mortality), national health surveys (e.g., NHIS, NHANES, MEPS, NSCH, BRFSS), national healthcare surveys (e.g., NHAMCS, NHDS, NAMCS), and demographic data sources (e.g., US Census, CPS, ACS). Dr. Johnson is particularly interested in leveraging existing national data sources for health disparities research and for use as context, complement, or comparison with local research data.

At Medica Research Institute Dr. Johnson is building a research program in social determinants of population health focused specifically on healthcare disparities and the role of the healthcare delivery system in improving population health. She continues to collaborate through the Center for Healthcare Innovation, Allina Hospitals & Clinics on two projects. Dr. Johnson is PI of the intramurally-funded "Disparities in Potentially Avoidable Hospital Care" and co-I of the NIH/NCCAM-funded "Effects of CAM therapies for inpatient pain management." She is also developing two new projects: one aims to link cultural context to healthcare utilization and CAM use; the other examines healthcare disparities as emergent phenomena of a complex system.

Recent Publications

Sendelbach S, Hearst MO, Johnson PJ, Unger BT, Mooney MR. (Forthcoming). Effects of variation in temperature management on cerebral performance category scores in patients who received therapeutic hypothermia post cardiac arrest. Resuscitation.

Ward AC & Johnson PJ. (Forthcoming). Necessary health care and basic needs: Health insurance plans and essential benefits. Health Care Analysis.

VanWormer JJ, Johnson PJ, Pereira RF, Boucher JL, Britt HR, Stephens CW, Thygeson NM. (Forthcoming). The Heart of New Ulm Project: Using community-based cardiometabolic risk factor screenings in a rural population health improvement initiative. Population Health Management.

Johnson PJ, Ward AC, Knutson L, Sendelbach S. (2012). Personal use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) by U.S. healthcare workers. Health Services Research, 47(1):211-227.

VanWormer JJ, Fyfe-Johnson A, Boucher JL, Johnson PJ, Britt HR, Thygeson NM, Dusek JA. (2011). Stress and workplace productivity loss in the Heart of New Ulm project. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 53(10): 1106-1109.

Call KT, Davern M, Boudreaux M, Johnson PJ, Nelson J. (2011). Bias in telephone surveys that do not sample cell phones: Uses and limits of post-stratification methods. Medical Care, 49(4):355-64.

Johnson PJ, Blewett LA, Davern ME. (2010). Disparities in public use data availability for race, ethnic and immigrant groups: National surveys for healthcare disparities research. Medical Care, 48(12):1122-1127.

Johnson PJ, Blewett LA, Call KT, Davern ME. (2010). American Indian uninsurance disparities: A comparison of 3 surveys. American Journal of Public Health, 100(10):1972-79.

Blewett LA, Johnson PJ, Mach A. (2010). Immigrant children's access to healthcare: Differences by global region of birth. Journal of Healthcare for the Poor and Underserved, 21(2 Suppl):13-31.

Johnson PJ, Carlson KF, Hearst MO. (2010). Healthcare disparities among American Indian veterans in the U.S. Medical Care, 48(6):563-569

Johnson PJ, Call KT, Blewett LA. (2010). The importance of geographic data aggregation in assessing disparities in American Indian prenatal care. American Journal of Public Health, 100(1):122-128.

Yu TC, Chou CF, Johnson PJ, Ward AC. (2010). Persistent disparities in Pap test use: Assessments and predictions for Asian women in the U.S., 1982-2010. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 12(4):445-53.

Chou CF, Johnson PJ, Blewett LA. (2010). Immigration and selected indicators of health status and healthcare utilization among the Chinese. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 12(4):470-9.

Chou CF, Johnson PJ, Ward AC, Blewett LA. (2009). Healthcare coverage is not a guarantee in the healthcare industry. American Journal of Public Health, 99(12):2282-88.

Hearst MO, Oakes JM, Johnson PJ. (2008). Effects of racial residential segregation on Black infant mortality. American Journal of Epidemiology, 168(11), 1247-1254.

Johnson PJ, Blewett LA, Ruggles S, Davern ME, King ML. (2008). Four decades of population health data: The Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) as an epidemiologic resource. Epidemiology, 19(6), 872-875.

Blewett LA, Johnson PJ, Lee BR, Scal PB. (2008). When a usual source of care and usual provider matter: adult prevention and screening services. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 23(9), 1354-1360.

Ward AC & Johnson PJ. (2008). Addressing confounding errors when using non-experimental, observational data to make causal claims. Synthese, 163(3), 419-432.

Johnson PJ, Oakes JM, Anderton DL. (2008). Neighborhood poverty and American Indian infant death: are the effects identifiable? Annals of Epidemiology, 18(7), 552-559.

Chou CF & Johnson PJ. (2008). Health disparities among America's health care providers: Evidence from the Integrated Health Interview Series, 1982-2004. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 50(6), 696-704.

Call KT, McAlpine DD, Johnson PJ, Beebe TJ, McRae JA, Song Y. (2006). Barriers to care among American Indians in public health care programs. Medical Care, 44(6), 595-600.

Oakes JM & Johnson PJ. (2006). Propensity score matching methods for social epidemiology. In JM Oakes & JS Kaufman (eds.), Methods in Social Epidemiology (pp. 364-386). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Krizek KJ & Johnson PJ. (2006). Proximity to trails and retail: Effects on urban cycling and walking. Journal of the American Planning Association, 72(1), 33-42.

Krizek KJ, Johnson PJ, Tilahun N. (2005). Gender differences in bicycling behavior and facility preferences. In Research on Women’s Issues in Transportation. Volume 2: Technical Papers (pp.31-40). Washington DC: Transportation Research Board of the National Academies.

Meschke LL, Johnson PJ, Eccles JS, Barber BL. (2003). Psychosocial factors predicting pubertal onset. In C. Hayward (ed.), Gender Differences at Puberty (pp. 217-238). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Johnson PJ & Hellerstedt WL. (2002). Current or past physical or sexual abuse as a risk marker for sexually transmitted disease in pregnant women. Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 34(2), 62-67.

Johnson PJ, Hellerstedt WL, Pirie PL. (2002). Abuse history and nonoptimal prenatal weight gain. Public Health Reports, 117(2), 148-156.

Hellerstedt WL, Johnson PJ, Oswald JW. (2002). The associations of prenatal substance use to birth outcomes and infant death: do they vary by maternal age and race? Health Education Monographs. 19(1), 7-17.

PubMed: Articles Indexed at PubMed

Honors

Disparities Leadership Program, Disparities Solutions Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, 2011-2012 (Beyond Community Benefit: Enhancing a Health System's Ability to Address Health Disparities through Healthcare Equity Research)

Institute on Systems Science and Health, funded by the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, National Institutes of Health, 2011 (Healthcare Disparities as Emergent Phenomena of a Complex System)

NIH Health Disparities Research Loan Repayment Program Award, National Institutes of Health, 2006-2008 (Methodologic Issues in American Indian Health Disparities Research)

Minority Health Statistics Dissertation Fellowship, Center for Excellence in Health Statistics, Minnesota Department of Health, 2002-2003 (Social Determinants of American Indian Infant Mortality: Social conditions as a fundamental cause of race group disparities)

Contact

Email: johns245@umn.edu

Website: http://www.medicaresearchinstitute.org/