Assessing Social Needs and Engaging Community Health Workers in Underserved Kansas Counties: Insights From Primary Care Providers and Clinic Managers.

Introduction: Rural and under-resourced urban communities face unique challenges in addressing patients' social determinants of health needs (SDoH). Community health workers (CHWs) can support patients experiencing social needs, yet little is known about how rural and under-resourced primary care clinics are screening for SDoH or utilizing CHWs.

Methods: Interviews were conducted with primary care clinic providers and managers across a geographically large and predominately rural state to assess screening practices for SDoH and related community resources, and perspectives on using CHWs to address SDoH.

Acoustic and perceptual characteristics of vowels produced during simultaneous communication.

Unlabelled: This study investigated the acoustical and perceptual characteristics of vowels in speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC). Twelve normal hearing, experienced sign language users were recorded under SC and speech alone (SA) conditions speaking a set of sentences containing monosyllabic words designed for measurement of vowel duration, formant frequencies, and fundamental frequency in consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllables and 60 listeners audited the speech samples. Although results indicated longer sentence and vowel durations for SC than SA, the data showed no difference in spectral characteristics of vowels produced during SC versus SA, indicating no degradation of vowel spectrum by rate alteration during SC.