Dr. Shah's primary research interests are to conduct behavioral and implementation science studies to inform clinical practice and health policy in healthcare delivery. Much of his research focuses on expanding the role of pharmacists in delivering cancer prevention and control services. Dr. Shah studies the adoption and integration of HPV vaccination services in community pharmacies to reduce missed opportunities for adolescents to get vaccinated. Dr. Shah also investigates how pharmacies can be used to provide colorectal cancer screening services to medically underserved communities. These lines of research apply a multilevel perspective to understanding the challenges of implementing evidence-based clinical services into a community pharmacy context.

Dr. Shah is co-leading an R01 study with Dr. Alison Brenner (UNC-Chapel Hill) in which they are investigating the utility of pharmacy-based colorectal cancer (CRC) screening services as a way to improve access and uptake to annual CRC screening. Their objective is to evaluate the effectiveness and implementation of a pharmacy-based fecal immunochemical testing (FIT) intervention called PharmFIT. Through collaboration with community pharmacies and primary care clinics in North Carolina and Washington, they aim to evaluate the impact, assess the implementation, and estimate the costs of the PharmFIT intervention. They will conduct a randomized controlled trial to assess the impact of PharmFIT on CRC screening rates in eligible primary care patients who are not up to date. Concurrently, they will use a mixed-method approach to assess a range of implementation outcomes and identify barriers and facilitators of the intervention. Finally, they will calculate the cost of PharmFIT to inform micro-costing and a budget impact analysis.