Barcelona Awarded $2.9M for ID-STIGMA Study

Assistant Professor Veronica Barcelona, PhD, has received a $2.9 million grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to investigate the association between perinatal outcomes and stigmatizing language in clinical documentation. 

In the five-year ID-STIGMA study, Barcelona and her colleagues will review records for about 35,000 pregnant women admitted to two hospitals in 2020-2024. They will refine and develop an existing natural language processing system to identify patterns in clinical documentation and determine if these patterns are associated with patient demographics and perinatal morbidity, with the goal of informing future interventions to improve documentation and the quality of patient care.

Barcelona recently completed a three-year Betty Irene Moore Fellowship for Nurse Leaders and Innovators. The new study extends her work on the fellowship project to include community and clinician perspectives on stigmatizing language use, additional maternal morbidity outcomes, and adverse neonatal outcomes.