Valerie Yelverton

Valerie is a PhD candidate and research assistant in the Department of Health Services Policy and Management at the University of South Carolina. She has a master's degree in Health Sciences and a bachelor's in Public Health and Administration from University of Applied Sciences Neubrandenburg in Germany. She also has a physiotherapy diploma and active physiotherapy license in Germany.

Valerie's research interests include healthcare access and outcome disparities among disadvantaged populations and in underserved areas, preferences and decision-making, and mixed methods research. Most of Valerie's research focuses on health disparities in the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), COVID-19, and human papillomavirus (HPV).

The importance and rigor of Valerie's research were recently recognized by being a 2023 Breakthrough Graduate Scholar Award recipient from the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of South Carolina and the sole recipient of the 2022 Outstanding Research Award from the Graduate School at University of South Carolina.

Valerie's dissertation combines quantitative and qualitative methods to map the mosaic of factors influencing telehealth decision processes, telehealth use, and HIV care outcomes in South Carolina. Her work is supported by an R36 dissertation grant by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (ARHQ). The goal of her dissertation is to contribute evidence to improve telehealth-supported healthcare options, and to characterize and mitigate access barriers to and health disparities in HIV care.

As a research assistant, Valerie works on a study to inform the design of preference-concordant telehealth HIV care options. In this project, she is using Best-Worst-Scaling (BWS), a survey method widely used to elicit individuals' preferences for goods and services, to prioritize telehealth features with respect to their relevance to patient preferences. The study has two specific aims:

Aim 1. Identify access- and preference-relevant features of telehealth HIV care from the perspectives of HIV care providers and diverse groups of people living with HIV in South Carolina.

Aim 2. Prioritize telehealth features with respect to their relevance to patient preferences.
The results of this study will describe which telehealth features may function as facilitators or barriers to HIV care across diverse patient populations and prioritize these features with respect to their importance to patients.