Yesterday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) unveiled new guidance about using telehealth during this public health emergency due to the coronavirus outbreak. This guidance will help increase access to telehealth services. In addition, this will help people receive care who may not be able to visit their providers in person. While the… Read More »
COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, is spreading across the US and around the world. Can providers use telehealth to help identify and manage the novel coronavirus while helping organizations manage capacity and prevent the spread of COVID-19? Read on to find out more. Because of its airborne person-to-person transmission, coronavirus and related… Read More »
Patients are sometimes referred to as “frequent flyers” when they visit an emergency department multiple times for the same issue. Often this is because discharged patients miss necessary follow-up care. This results in further worsening health, and may contribute to the frequent flying. To address this cycle, patients may be referred to a community health… Read More »
An October 2019 Medical Care supplement describes a learning health care system: the VA Evidence Synthesis Program (ESP). The ESP is dedicated to making high-quality evidence accessible to improve health and healthcare for veterans. The articles in the issue describe the outcomes from integrating research synthesis with qualitative and quantitative data from health systems. These… Read More »
This year, teachers striking across the country have found common ground on a priority outside of typical debates around salaries or pensions. Educators in three major cities–Los Angeles, Oakland, and Chicago–among others, have been calling for more school counselors, librarians, nurses, psychologists, and social workers to support their students’ development beyond academic benchmarks. These public… Read More »
Creating the Healthiest Nation: For science. For action. For health. The annual meeting of the American Public Health Association is just around the corner! The meeting starts this weekend, November 2nd, and runs through November 6th in Philadelphia. Special Sessions The Medical Care Section has some fantastic sessions planned for the meeting. In addition to… Read More »
When was the last time you recall seeing your health information recorded on paper? Probably not recently. As stressed in an earlier blog post, electronic health record (EHR) adoption is becoming commonplace for a majority of healthcare providers. Your personal information that was once stored on stagnant paper records is now being captured in dynamic… Read More »
A 14-year-old girl came to my primary care clinic with abdominal pain, similar to abdominal pain she’s had intermittently for years. As with all women of reproductive age, I checked a urine pregnancy test, and it was positive. I returned to the patient’s room to talk with her about the result, and her first question… Read More »
Access to care facilitates better health, and much of the work in Medical Care analyzes policy changes that affect insurance coverage both for the population as a whole and for disadvantaged groups (see examples, here, here, and here). Unfortunately, even as governments and researchers work on existing problems, technology is enabling new barriers. Wellness programs… Read More »
Vaping and the use of e-cigarettes, especially among teenagers, has been in the news frequently in recent months. But what does the research-based evidence have to say about these new devices? I sat down with Jessica Pepper, PhD, MPH, a top published author in the field of e-cigarette research, to learn more about the prevalence… Read More »
“One foot in the grave,” he said. “Is that how you feel?” I asked. “No, it’s how I live.” Unsheltered for 38 years, he had lived primarily behind a dumpster floating in and out of the medical, social and judicial system. In the month before the new Keck School of Medicine of the University of… Read More »
President Trump wants $5 billion right now for his border wall, and another $7 billion (or maybe $13 billion) later on to finish the project. What else could we do with that kind of money? Here’s an idea: with $12 billion we could cover ALL 3.9 million uninsured children in the US today, and still have a… Read More »
The December edition of Health Wonk Review is now up at Health System Ed. In case you missed it, our contribution for this month comes from Jess Williams and covers some interesting new collaborative work on what research topics should be prioritized according to people with diabetes and/or obesity and researchers specializing in the fields.… Read More »
Greetings from San Diego, where we’re just wrapping up the 2018 meeting of the American Public Health Association. It’s been a whirlwind stretch of great presentations, engaging conversations, and electric scooters! Have you seen these things? I was surprised at how many of my public health colleagues were willing to ride without a helmet… But… Read More »
The October edition of Health Wonk Review is now up at Joe Paduda’s Managed Care Matters blog. This month, our featured post is the excellent commentary by new contributor Dr. Ranit Mishori titled The Social Determinants of Health? What about the Political Determinants of Health? Enjoy!
Welcome to Point-Counterpoint – the BLOG Edition! In this series — as in the series by the same name in the journal — authors stake out positions on current issues, highlighting the pros and cons. In this Point-Counterpoint, we discuss the new Apple Watch’s electrocardiogram (ECG) technology, launched with the Apple Watch Series 4. The… Read More »
This month’s Health Wonk Review, by Andrew Sprung at xpostfactoid, is called Map of Malfunction. Andrew describes this month’s edition as “a smorgasbord of smart takes on the morphing ACA marketplace; various dysfunctions (and one or two functions) of U.S. health care; and political wars over Medicare and the ACA.” The round-up features Red Thaddeus Miguel’s first… Read More »
Last Tuesday I saw eight patients in my morning clinic; I felt like I did a lot. I saw Ms. S, a sixty-two-year-old lady with high blood pressure and diabetes; we chatted about her cats while I checked her feet and titrated her insulin. I treated my 9:30 am patient with some antibiotics for a… Read More »
We have been contributing to the Health Wonk Review, a longstanding roundup of “the best of the best” in health policy-related blog posts, on an irregular basis for some time. Starting this month, we’re pleased to announce that we’ll be participating more regularly. We will post a notice and link to the latest edition every… Read More »
As the City of Worcester Commissioner of Health and Human Services, I have developed city-wide initiatives and worked on policy change to address three primary health issues prevalent in our community, those being addiction, mental health, and homelessness, which all tend to occur hand in hand. Addiction is the largest public health and public safety… Read More »
“Neonatal abstinence syndrome” (NAS) sounds deceptively innocuous, given that it is literally infant drug withdrawal. It is usually caused by prenatal exposure to opioids but can also result from maternal consumption of other substances, like alcohol and antianxiety medications. Common symptoms include excessive high-pitched crying, fever, sweating, irritability, vomiting, diarrhea, rapid breathing, sleep disturbances, and poor… Read More »
Hurricane Irma was the first major hurricane to hit Florida in over a decade, causing catastrophic damage in many areas. The human impact of the hurricane was also devastating, with reports of more than 50 deaths in the state. Among these deaths were ten residents of a nursing home in Hollywood Hills that lost power… Read More »
Reproductive rights have been a topic for policy making and legal jurisprudence throughout much of the past century. As the healthcare system of the United States continues to evolve, women’s health and reproductive rights remain central to the debate. A recent policy update by Aishwarya Rajagopalan and Lisa Lines here at The Medical Care Blog discusses… Read More »
The burden of contraception falls primarily on women. In the United States, women need prescriptions for the majority of contraceptive methods, and so are vulnerable to changes in the healthcare system affecting access to care. Recently, President Trump has issued executive orders on religious liberty and related subjects that have paved the way for a rule… Read More »
Expensive brand-name drugs are prescribed over older, less costly generics whose efficacy and risk profiles aren’t much different. Sometimes the financial issues involved are painfully obvious, such as when a drug company introduces a new, “improved” version of a medication that is merely a longer-acting version of the same chemical entity shortly before the patent expires on the original… Read More »
Republican Congressional leaders are currently debating how to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as part of the budget reconciliation process. Much of the debate over the ACA has focused on the individual mandate (and here) and the affordability (here and here) of coverage in the state-based marketplaces. The House version of the legislation, however,… Read More »
In a recent Medical Care article, Guy and colleagues analyzed health insurance expansions among parents from 1999 through 2012 to assess the impacts of four different types of public and private expansions. They primarily examined changes in parents’ health insurance coverage, but they also analyzed whether expanding coverage for parents could “spill over” and raise coverage… Read More »
The unintended pregnancy rate (reflecting pregnancies that are unwanted or mistimed) for women in the U.S. has hovered at around 50% for the last 35 years. Only recently has that rate dropped to 45%, but the burden continues to fall most heavily on poor, undereducated women, women from racial or ethnic minority backgrounds, and young women. Much talk… Read More »
After a whirlwind APHA 2016 in Denver, we are back with a quick summary of the meeting and Medical Care Section events. There were about 11,600 conference registrants overall. We were impressed with the great turnout for Medical Care Section events. We had standing room only for the Special Invited Panel Session: The Childhood Roots of Health Inequity, a… Read More »
In just a few days, thousands of public health practitioners, students, scholars, and activists will descend on Denver, Colorado for APHA 2016. This year, your faithful co-editors will be there, live-tweeting about sessions! So be sure to follow @MedCareBloggers for real-time updates. Here are just a few of the sessions we’re looking forward to this year:… Read More »
In a new Medical Care article published ahead of print, Cheryl R. Clark, MD, ScD, and colleagues, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard, provide pre-ACA implementation estimates of income-based disparities in delayed or forgone care due to cost by race/ethnicity, by state-level Medicaid expansion status. Reforms can be unevenly implemented even if they address the primary causes of… Read More »
Nearly halfway through the primaries, the Democratic primary contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders continues. And perhaps nothing sets these candidates further apart in the progressiveness of their agenda than their approaches to health care. In this post, let’s take a look at the vastly different approaches to health care proposed by candidates Clinton and Sanders, with a particular focus on primary care.
According to data out this month from the Kaiser Family Foundation, there are 2 male doctors for every 1 female in practice in the US. This translates to about 300,000 fewer women than men in practice today. This gender difference is a disparity that many in health care may think has resolved, but in fact… Read More »
Earlier this month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released a proposed federal rule to implement smoke-free public housing. The proposed rule would affect all living units, common areas, outdoor areas up to 25 feet away from the housing areas, and administrative offices. The change would affect over 700,000 units no later than… Read More »