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Dr. Blalock is a behavioral scientist with expertise in the area of patient and public health education. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in pharmacy and public health from the University of Michigan. Her doctoral degree is from the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education in the Gillings School of Global Public Health at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is particularly interested in research assessing the impact of pharmaceutical care, including patient education and counseling, on patient health outcomes. Her past research has focused primarily on the prevention and treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, and osteoporosis.
Her current work focuses on the evaluation of community-pharmacy-based programs focused on illness prevention and disease management. Current projects include evaluation of a falls prevention program delivered via community pharmacy residents; an osteoporosis prevention program targeting patients taking oral glucocorticoids, a class of medications known to increase the risk of developing osteoporosis; and a proactive pneumococcal vaccination program delivered through community pharmacies. In these studies, Dr. Blalock collaborates closely with colleagues in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics.
Dr. Blalock also has expertise in the development of patient-reported outcomes measures. Her work includes development of a scale to assess patient concerns regarding their pharmacotherapy. Community pharmacists can use this instrument to tailor their counseling efforts toward each patient's unique needs. Examples of other areas of interest include how best to train pharmacists and pharmacy students to provide high quality patient education; the impact of medication counseling on patient outcomes such as satisfaction with care, medication adherence, drug-therapy problems, and adverse drug events; how to improve the quality of written patient education materials; and structural factors that may facilitate, or impede, the provision of high quality educational services by pharmacists.