A Health Podyssey

Medical training has historically focused almost exclusively on the skills and actions of individual physicians. Increasingly, clinical training is incorporating an understanding of how team-based care affects patient outcomes. For patients with chronic disease such as diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol, can teams provide better care? Maximilian Pany and Lucy Chen, both MD-PhD candidates...

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted an increase in telehealth utilization . Since that growth, researchers have made calls to ensure that telehealth's subsequent growth does not exacerbate disparities in care . Evidence of the “ digital divide ,” or differences in the technology or skills needed to access telehealth care, is widely documented . Race, age, geography, health coverage, and more can al...

Bundled payments have long been an experiment in the Medicare program to help reduce health care spending. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) gave the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services broad authority to test bundled payments, or paying providers for episodes of care instead of for each service provided. Research has found savings associated with participating in the Bundled Payment for Care I...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an enormous wave of disruption to the U.S. economy, leading the unemployment rate to rise to a record high of 14.7% in April 2020 . While unemployment has since improved — the unemployment rate in January 2021 was 6.3% — America has yet to reach the employment levels it held before the pandemic. In response to so many out of work, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Econo...

There's no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic spurred an increase in telemedicine use. As Americans were reluctant to venture out of their homes in the pandemic's early months, both public and private payers were quick to change telehealth reimbursement policies as admissions plummeted . According to new research published in the February edition of Health Affairs , 30.1% of all outpatient visits we...

"Quite honestly, it is not easy to be a nerd on the reservation." - Dr. Donald Warne Pathways are not predetermined in life. But, without readily available role models to point to, it can be difficult for young people to know what options may be available as they advance toward adulthood. Currently, there's a shortage of health care providers for Indigenous populations , which have been linked to...

In the February 2021 edition, Health Affairs presented a collection of papers from the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) for their Vital Directions for Health and Health Care project . While originally established in 2016, NAM reassessed its priorities and found a vastly different health care landscape in 2020. Not only had the COVID-19 pandemic ripped through the health care ecosystem nationwide...

The opioid epidemic has ravaged American life. It has claimed more than 750,000 lives as a result of a drug overdose since 1999. In 2018 alone, more than 2 million people had an opioid use disorder and more than 800,000 people used heroin. To alleviate these deaths of despair and get people the treatment they need, many individuals are looking to short-term residential facilities for substance use...

Have health economists been underestimating supply-side constraints when making predictions regarding cost and utilization for universal health coverage programs, such as Medicare For All? That's certainly what Dr. Adam Gaffney, a pulmonary specialist from Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School, and colleagues posit in a new policy paper published in the January 2021 issue of Health...

More than 500,000 individuals in the U.S. experience homeless at any given time, and many of those individuals qualify for Medicaid in states that expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act. Medicaid expansion can be helpful for individuals unable to afford private health insurance. Medicaid expansion has been found to slow rates of health decline for some low-income adults , for example....

For better or worse, online platforms and social media have enabled individuals to publicly post their opinions of businesses online. As a result, business are at the mercy of public feedback, which can have an impact on their success. Hospitals and physicians are not immune to this trend. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has pushed the idea of consumerization through price transpare...

Every year, Health Affairs publishes a retrospective look at national healthcare spending. In 2020, Anne Martin and colleagues from the CMS Office of the Actuary found that U.S. healthcare spending increased 4.6% to $3.8 trillion in 2019 .  The rate of health spending declined slightly from 2018, which noted a growth rate of 4.7%. Hospital care, physician and clinical services, and retail purchase...

As we close the books on the year 2020, we turn the tables on Health Affairs Editor-in-Chief Alan Weil wherein the interviewer becomes the interviewee. Alan shares a bit about his educational background, what it actually means to be the editor for the leading health policy journal, and how empirical research has changed since the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking back at the year's event, he elaborates o...

From severe weather such as the destructive wildfires in California to air pollution nationwide, there's a growing body of knowledge linking climate change to human health. On this episode of A Health Podyssey, host Alan Weil interviews Dr. Kristie Ebi, a professor in the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington, to discuss this complex relationship. Ebi served as the theme advi...

Does America have a healthy relationship with food? In addition to the direct health effects of diet, food production and distribution affects environmental factors, which then trickles down to our health statuses. For example, an estimated one quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions relate to food production . In a new paper published in the climate-centric December edition of Health Affairs ,...

How are Indigenous communities responding to climate change? It’s an important but often under-looked question. As a new paper published in the climate-centric December edition of Health Affairs posits, Indigenous communities are uniquely vulnerable as climate-related events can impact their day-to-day lives, self-determination, and physical and emotional health. In 2016, the Pala Band of Mission...

Brooke Cunningham is a general internist, sociologist, and assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Minnesota. After George Floyd's killing, she wrote and published a Narrative Matters essay in Health Affairs on how the health effects of racism become embodied for her and other Black Americans. On this episode of A Health Podyssey, Health A...

In November, the pharma companies Pfizer and Moderna both announced substantial progress on a potential COVID-19 vaccine. While both vaccines showed promising results during clinical trials, questions remain for what's next and how to distribute a vaccine once it's available for public use. One major question mark concerns logistics. For example, the Pfizer vaccine needs to be kept at extremely co...

New York City was an initial focal point for COVID-19 outbreaks in the U.S. with the virus then quickly spreading across the country. With time, data, and analysis, researchers are learning more about how the novel coronavirus is affecting different swaths of the U.S. population. Leonard Egede, division chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine in the Department of Medicine and director o...

No matter which side of the aisle you sit, the 2020 U.S. presidential election has been as memorable as it's been remarkable.  On November 4th — less than 24 hours after the final polls closed — Health Affairs' Alan Weil sat down with Kimberly Leonard, Senior Healthcare Reporter at Business Insider , and Shannon Muchmore, Editor at Healthcare Dive , to share his perspective on what the future of h...

We’ve long known that community resources — good schools, walkability, food security, etc. — affect opportunities for children’s health and behaviors to develop. But how do we measure these characteristics and use our knowledge to create better policy?  In this episode of A Health Podyssey, Health Affairs Editor-in-Chief Alan Weil interviews Brandeis University’s Dr. Dolores Acevedo-Garcia to disc...

Schools and childcare centers quickly closed in reaction to COVID-19 in the spring of 2020 — and many remain closed or only provided remote services well into the fall. While school closures appear to slow the spread of the virus, for many children the health ramifications are far broader. Children who depend on schools for meals or special needs are suddenly at a loss when schools close. In this...

How do you take a good idea — like screening children to see if they're on a healthy developmental trajectory — and get that idea adopted by thousands of small separate pediatric practices spread across a state or the entire country? The answer is collaboration and leadership. Vermont Child Health Improvement Program (VCHIP) is a pediatric program run by the University of Vermont to help pediatric...

Tragically, motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of adolescent mortality and injury in the United States with new, inexperienced drivers at particular risk. The risk is under-recognized in health care. One way forward could be virtual driving simulations. Recently, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, through its spun out business Diagnostic Driving, partnered with the state of Ohio to...