HOLISTIC Cohort Study (2019-2023)
HOLISTIC: Health Professional Students at the University of Illinois at Chicago Cohort Study
HOLISTIC, a cohort study conducted by an interprofessional team of students and faculty from across the UIC health science colleges was initiated in November 2019 and ended in February 2023 after completing three years of data collection. HOLISTIC was a survey-based research study that collected demographic information, portions of the Brief Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a modified version of the SAGE Working Group Vaccine Hesitancy Scale. HOLISTIC gathered data on the health and health behaviors from health professionals in training at UIC and recent UIC alumni. Like many other things that were initiated in early 2020 as the COVID 19 pandemic began, HOLISTIC covered a period of historic opportunity to understand the impact of an unprecedented disruption in health professions training.
While HOLISTIC provided valuable to UIC about our own students, results also added to what was a very limited amount of published literature about the health and health behaviors of health professions students and early career health professionals. Informing the design of health promotion efforts was one positive application of HOLISTIC findings. In 2024, UIC’s Office of Students Affairs took over efforts to monitor student well-being and for planning health and well-being initiatives for students across UIC.
The HOLISTIC Cohort Study was supported by funding from the UI College of Medicine Chicago George H. Miller Fund and was approved by the UIC Institutional Review Board (IRB Protocol # 2021-0114).
HOLISTIC Cohort Study Dissemination
The HOLISTIC research team published 3 papers in peer reviewed journals with members of the interprofessional student research team as first authors.
- Dommaraju, S. R., Rivera, S. G., Rocha, E. G., Bicknell, S., Loizzo, D., Mohammad, A., Rajan, P., Seballos, A., Datta, A., Ahmed, R., Krishnan, J. A., & Keehn, M. T. (2022). Health professional students at the university of illinois chicago cohort study: A protocol. PloS One, 17(8), e0269964. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269964
- Loizzo, D., Datta, A., Dommaraju, S., Abdulbaseer, U., Krishnan, J., Keehn, M., & Rashid, A. (2022). COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among health professional students: Cross-sectional data from the first wave of the HOLISTIC cohort study. Vaccines (Basel), 10(9), 1566. https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines10091566
- Patel, A., Lu, J., Bitra, J., Dommaraju, S., Loizzo, D., Guillen, B., Kane, N., Westnedge, D., Guzman, J. L., Giang, N., Hartnett, I., Keehn, M. T., Ahmed, R., Krishnan, J. A., & Fokuo, K. (2025). Lifestyle behaviors and mental health of health professional students during COVID-19, as measured by the CDC’s BRFSS, for the HOLISTIC cohort study. PLOS Mental Health, 2(4), e0000302. 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000302