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Over the past 20 years, the Institute for Health Promotion Research (IHPR) at UT Health San Antonio has worked to improve health in South Texas and beyond.
The IHPR, under the leadership of Dr. Amelie G. Ramirez, built the nation’s first digital health communications program on Latino health, saved lives with culturally relevant patient navigation for women, helped people quit smoking, and more.
For its 20th anniversary on Oct. 1, 2026, let’s celebrate some of our biggest milestones!
IHPR Creates the Salud America! National Digital Communications Program
Just a year into its existence, the IHPR team created the Salud America! program.
The program, funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2007, became the first national digital health communication network to improve Latino health.
Over its 19 years of operation, Salud America! has built an online network of over 400,000 parents, community and school leaders, and health stakeholders across the U.S.
The program uses digital content curation to fuel its online network with curated multimedia research, stories, and tools to start and support healthy changes to systems and environments where Latino and all families can better live, learn, work, and play.
Salud America! has:
- built the Latino childhood obesity field with 20 grantees who leveraged small pilot funds into more than $30 million in new research funding
- developed over 30 policy comment campaigns to enable over 10,000 people to speak up on federal health issues
- created actions tools to help people create trauma-sensitive schools, start school food pantries, implement screening for the non-medical drivers of health, and more
- maintained a website, social media channels, and email system featuring news, resources, toolkits, and role model stories to empower grassroots healthy changes
A recent Salud America! survey shows that members’ change-making actions are significantly associated with engagement in SA! communications.
The program has gone on to demonstrate that digital content curation is an effective, measurable public health promotion tool for raising awareness and action.
Today, the program is as strong as ever.
In 2025, Salud America! curated 162 news stories and 15 role model hero stories, generating over 2 million impressions on social media.
Over 17,000 advocates downloaded a Health Report Card, a data visualization of the non-medical drivers of health in their area, to use for advocacy, share with decision-makers, build data into grants, etc.
“Salud America! is truly helping community leaders drive community change for Latinos and all people in the US,” Ramirez said.
IHPR Launches First Report Highlighting Specific Disease Issues in South Texas
South Texas, home to 5.2 million people, faces unique health challenges.
So, just two years after launching, the IHPR at UT Health San Antonio published its seminal report, the South Texas Health Status Review, in 2008.
The Review was the first comprehensive statistical illustration of the health issues from obesity to cancer that impact residents in the 38-county South Texas region.
The Review found that South Texas Latinos are at disproportionately greater risk of having liver cancer (64%), cervical cancer (46%), gallbladder cancer (8%), gastric cancer (4%), and pediatric leukemia (32%) than peers in the rest of Texas and the U.S.
IHPR updated the Review again in 2013 and 2018.
“This Review enabled us to lay the groundwork for our Mays Cancer Center to provide responsive care and tailored research for the local population,” Ramirez said.
IHPR Finds Patient Navigation Speeds Confirmatory Breast Cancer Diagnosis, Treatment for Latinas
Breast cancer is a top cause of death for Latinas.
Extra support, called “patient navigation,” can lead to faster breast cancer diagnosis and start of treatment for Latinas after an abnormal mammogram result, according to several studies led by the IHPR at UT Health San Antonio.
Bilingual patient navigators worked with a group of 480 Latinas who had an abnormal mammogram. They accompanied patients to appointments, provided phone support, and helped with transportation arrangements, language translation, and insurance paperwork.
As a result, the time between an abnormal mammogram and eventual diagnosis – whether positive or negative for cancer – was significantly shortened.
Also, a higher percentage of navigated women than control women started treatment within 30 days (69.0% vs. 46.3%) and 60 days (97.6% vs. 73.1%) after their diagnosis. Navigated women typically initiated treatment in about 22-25 days. Non-navigated women typically initiated treatment in about 33-46 days.
“Our patient navigation likely saved the lives of many Latinas in the study by reducing the time to diagnosis and start of treatment,” Ramirez said.
IHPR’s Quitxt Program Helps South Texans Quit Smoking
Smoking is still considered the leading preventable cause of disease.
That is why IHPR researchers Drs. Amelie Ramirez and Patricia Chalela led the design and creation of Quitxt, a free, bilingual, evidence-based quit-smoking service for young adults using text messages and mobile media in 2015.
The original program, funded by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT), yielded a 21.4% quit rate among enrollees at 7-month follow-up.
Subsequent funding helped Quitxt add a quit-vaping version, expand to recruit smokers in rural and metro areas of Texas, and integrate referrals to the service among tobacco-using patients from Mays Cancer Center and primary care clinics at UT Health San Antonio.
Today, Ramirez and Chalela are leading a CPRIT research grant to evaluate the effectiveness of Quitxt in helping 1,200 Latino smokers quit smoking.
“From starting up a culturally tailored quit-smoking service to expanding it to a large-scale research study, Quitxt reflects our long-term commitment to empowering young adults with accessible, culturally relevant tools to quit tobacco,” Ramirez said.
IHPR Establishes First-Ever Conference on Latino Cancer Continuum
In 2018, the IHPR partnered with the Mays Cancer Center at UT Health San Antonio to host the first Advancing Cancer Research for Latinos and All Populations (ACRLP) conference.
The conference brought together a multidisciplinary group of professionals to review the state of the science, identify emerging issues with care, and foster collaborations to reduce cancer among Latinos and all people.
Since then, ACRLP conferences in 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, and 2026 united over 200 guest speakers and 1,200 prominent attendees from the U.S., Puerto Rico, and Guatemala.
ACRLP conferences have generated new ideas for research, practice, and communication to address cancer and Latinos and all people, and led to multidisciplinary collaborations to build on substantial advancements in cancer from prevention through survivorship. The conference has also showcased over 400 new research studies.
Read conference proceedings from 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, and 2026.
Save the date for the next ACRLP conference on Feb. 23-25, 2028.
IHPR Institutionalizes Use of Promotoras de Salud
Across its 20-year history, the IHPR has used community health workers (CHWs), including patient navigators and promotoras de salud, to improve cancer care in South Texas under the leadership of IHPR Director Dr. Amelie Ramirez, in collaboration with IHPR Assistant Director Rebecca Jones and IHPR researcher Dr. Patricia Chalela.
CHWs are trained bilingual, bicultural health workers who identify issues with care among the population, help people overcome those issues, and connect patients with resources and services that can improve their health outcomes.
For example, from 2020 to 2025, CHWs have led over 300 community events and educated over 9,347 people on cancer-related care and services.
“This initiative has strengthened our capacity to expand community access to relevant educational materials and foster greater participation in clinical research,” Ramirez said.
IHPR Establishes First Cohort Study on Latino Cancer Survivorship
The good news is that the U.S. is home to four million Latino cancer survivors.
The bad news is that they often struggle with advanced disease, poor quality of life, and stressful social and economic issues.
That is why the IHPR at UT Health San Antonio is co-leading the first national cohort study to unpack the social, cultural, behavioral, psychosocial, biological, and medical influences on post-cancer life in Latino cancer survivors.
The study, “Avanzando Caminos (Leading Pathways): The Hispanic/Latino Cancer Survivorship Study,” is funded by a 6-year, $9.8-million grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) that teams the IHPR and the Mays Cancer Center with researchers at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami.
Avanzando Caminos is recruiting a 3,000 Latino breast, colorectal, kidney, lung, prostate, stomach, or cervical cancer survivors in Miami and San Antonio.
These survivors share their stories to pay it forward.
Like stomach cancer survivor Yolanda “Yoli” Barrera Day, breast cancer survivor Linda Mota, and prostate cancer survivor Rick Alvarado.
“We are learning so much from our survivors that we hope will help future survivors heal, recover, and reduce the chances of cancer coming back,” Ramirez said.
IHPR Proves Yoga Can Help Cancer Survivors Stay Fit
Under the leadership of IHPR researchers Drs. Amelie G. Ramirez and Daniel Carlos Hughes, the IHPR found that yoga is a viable fitness option for breast cancer survivors.
Their study divided survivors into three groups: one to do yoga, one to do regular gym workouts, and one to just stay active at their choosing.
During the study, all participants exercised three hours a week.
All three groups were just as effective in terms of body fat, fitness, and physical function, suggesting that the actual engagement in exercise behaviors may be more important than the specific type of exercise.
Ramiez and Hughes worked with Nydia Darby, the San Antonio-based innovator of therapeutic yoga, to expand the work to include yoga and patient support.
Although Hughes has since retired, the work he helped start is continuing.
In 2026, Ramirez and Darby received a 2-year, $400,000 leadership grant to study cancer survivorship from Susan G. Komen, to enhance recovery for cancer survivors using standard physical therapy and therapeutic yoga.
“By focusing on the whole person and listening to survivor experiences, we hope to find more effective, culturally responsive ways to support recovery,” Ramirez said.
IHPR Works with Survivors, Advocates to Create a Cancer Research Agenda
In South Texas, risk is high for liver cancer, cervical cancer, and pediatric leukemia.
To pave way for responsive research, the IHPR researcher Dr. Rebecca Jones launched Creando Conexiones: Creating a Patient Centered Cancer Health Research Agenda in South Texas (Creando Conexiones).
Dr. Jones’ project aimed to outline patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research priorities and topics identified by South Texas cancer survivors, caregivers, and stakeholders affected by these cancers.
The result is the Creando Conexiones: Cancer-Related Health Outcomes Research Agenda, published in 2026.
The agenda identified several priority areas addressing the needs of cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers in South Texas.
“The agenda was shaped by survivors and caregivers who said the project played a role in their own healing process, and provided a way to share this experience to help other families navigate their own cancer journeys,” Jones said.
Read the IHPR’s 20th anniversary booklet!
Editor’s note: This story is part of a series of stories and videos celebrating the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Institute for Health Promotion Research (IHPR) at UT Health San Antonio on Oct. 1, 2006.
By The Numbers
44
million
immigrants live in the United States
