Annette DeVito Dabbs

Dr. DeVito Dabbs has more than 40 years of clinical experience managing people with chronic cardiopulmonary conditions, including recipients of solid organ transplants. Her scholarly interests include the promotion of patient engagement, active partnerships between patients and clinicians, health information technology, health-related quality of life after transplantation, qualitative research, and mixed-methods analysis techniques. She leads an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, behavioral scientists, engineers, and human factors specialists to develop and evaluate Pocket PATH Synergy, a suite of technologies to support behaviors of patients and clinicians working together to promote self-management to achieve better health outcomes. Dr. DeVito Dabbs is currently the PI for a full-scale R01funded by NINR to evaluate the efficacy of a tele-rehabilitation behavioral exercise intervention and  an CO-PI for a multi-centered R01 funded by NIDDK to design and test a technology-based intervention to support adolescents’ adherence to medication taking after kidney transplantation. She also serves as a co-investigator on multiple grants for projects including promoting psychosocial outcomes after living donation and the development of quality of life technologies.

Dr. DeVito Dabbs is the faculty advisor for the O’Neil-Pitt Nursing Fellowship in Patient Engagement and the Director of the School’s T32 Technology: Research in Chronic and Critical Illness Training grant and the SON sponsored eHealth Research Hub. She was a founding faculty member for the NSF-funded Quality of Life Technology Center (a joint project between Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University) and currently serves on the Expert Panel for Informatics and Technology for the American Academy of Nurses.