Bonnie Spring has always had the drive and desire to improve public health.
The Florida State University professor’s initial research into serious mental illness, while earning her master’s and doctoral degrees at Harvard, has been cited more than 3,000 times. When further progress was stymied by a lack of objective measurement tools, the psychology graduate pivoted and retrained as a health psychologist.
Spring focuses on risk behaviors such as smoking, overeating, poor diet and physical inactivity — the primary factors behind chronic adverse health conditions such as diabetes and heart disease — and ways to get people to change their behavior patterns.
“It was having an impact through behavioral interventions that captured my heart, and being able to expand an intervention so it’s large enough to be a public health benefit continues to grip my attention,” she said.
Over the past 30 years, her research has focused on both the prevention of and intervention into health-risk behaviors. She uses a variety of analysis tools, including longitudinal modeling and machine learning for predictive analytics.
Spring is passionate about the suite of Multiphase Optimization Strategies, known as MOST, which is a framework that uses engineering principles to create multi-component behavioral interventions. MOST aims to create interventions that are effective, affordable, scalable and efficient, sometimes referred to as EASE.
“Underserved populations rarely have only one behavioral health risk, and effective interventions often have multiple components,” she said. “Being able to holistically address the underlying issues as well as the behaviors tends to lead to better outcomes.”
Spring joined the Florida State University College of Medicine late last year, after 19 years at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. She is the Krafft Professor of Behavioral and Social Medicine, as well as director of the College of Medicine’s Florida Blue Center for Rural Health Research and Policy, which is housed in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine.
“We are fortunate to have attracted such a highly regarded and well-funded researcher as Bonnie Spring,” College of Medicine Dean Alma Littles, said. “With the college continuing to expand its research opportunities for all students, M.D. and PA as well as Ph.D., her research skill set and demonstrated commitment to mentoring will be an asset to our students, as well as our junior faculty.
“Her knowledge of rural health issues will help her lead the Florida Blue Center for Rural Health Research and Policy to a new level of achievement and likely influence legislation in Florida and across the country.”
The center was initially created in 2002 through a gift from the Florida Blue Foundation, Florida Blue Cross Blue Shield’s philanthropic arm. Professor Heather Flynn, a clinical psychologist and researcher who chairs the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine, is excited to have Spring reboot the center and use her skills to improve the lives of rural Floridians.
“Bonnie really brings a multi-faceted and fresh vision for the center and its future that incorporates innovations in digital health research, as well as training the next generation of researchers,” Flynn said. “She has been successful in integrating different digital health tools and technology – such as wearables, apps, and electronic medical records – with telehealth coaching to create successful interventions for people with multiple-risk behaviors.”
Spring’s introduction to rural health research came courtesy of Nancy Schoenberg, Marian Pearsall Professor of Behavioral Science in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.
Schoenberg, who has a background in anthropology, wondered whether an intervention Spring had created and implemented in the Chicago area years earlier could be adapted for use in rural populations. Schoenberg placed a cold call to Spring, and a great collaboration was born.
“Rural residents tend to be older, sicker and poorer,” Schoenberg said. “Bonnie has great strength in developing and implementing interventions, and I loved this one. The results were stunning, and the positive effects were sustained. I spent maybe a year and a half or two years adapting it.”
Spring and Schoenberg then went on to collaborate on a $2.5 million grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, for a clinical trial on stress and sleep in which participants logged their daily food intake and physical activity.
For Spring, working in rural Appalachia was life-changing. In college, she had adopted three sustaining core values – commitment, community and creativity – to have a positive impact on the world around her. Rural health research presented a renewed opportunity to do all three and made her want “to get back to the basics.”
Now at Florida State University, Spring hopes she can bring her years of experience and commitment to train more students and ultimately engage new communities facing health care gaps.
“We have the most expensive health care in the world, and we’re living in a delusional bubble,” Spring said. “The demand for health care is always going to outstrip availability. You have to use what resources you have and engage the communities whose needs you’re trying to meet.
“We have to meet people where they are and accept them as they are, so they will accept us as partners.”