New USM Lab Partners with National Lab for Health Assessments

Tue, 01/24/2023 - 09:08am | By: Van Arnold

The new Sports Medicine and Community Health (SMaCH) Lab at The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) has launched a partnership with national testing aggregator Fitnescity to utilize the expertise both entities can provide for wellness assessments.

“The initial partnership with Fitnescity is a way to leverage University resources for the broader community to access highly specialized body assessment equipment toward the achievement of their wellness and health goals,” said Dr. Jennifer Lemacks, Associate Dean for Research in the College of Nursing and Health Professions at USM.

To illustrate the USM partnership, a customer would contact Fitnescity to schedule a bone densitometry measurement at the USM lab. SMaCh Lab would be notified to facilitate scheduling and perform the test.

Lemacks points out that SMaCH represents a growing effort that aims to ultimately institutionalize as a center, while supporting two divisions: the Precision Health Assessment and Promotion Lab, and the Learning Lab.

The Learning Lab provides hands-on opportunities for practical skills development in sports medicine, physical assessment and measurement, biostatistics, and human subjects research.

The Precision Health Assessment and Promotion Lab offers experiential learning and research opportunities through the provision of disease prevention, performance and health aging services – to include physical, behavioral and social determinants of health assessments – health education classes, and health coach sessions.

“Our goals for 2023 are to expand the equipment offering of the lab to provide more assessments for body composition and caloric needs monitoring, as well as leverage existing and establish new partnerships with local healthcare entities to provide DEXA (and other) assessments and services on a reduced cost, sliding scale fee basis,” said Lemacks.

Fitnescity connects customers to a trusted network of hundreds of test locations around the country. Fitnescity then takes the results and generates insights on its digital platform, which makes tracking progress over time simple, inspiring accountability.