Author Archives: John M. Westfall and Hoon Byun

About John M. Westfall and Hoon Byun

Hoon is an economist at the Robert Graham Center, and works closely with an interdisciplinary team on both short-term research and policy matters, as well as longer-term projects on topics ranging from Safety Net Clinics, Rural Health, Medical Education, Comprehensiveness, and the Family Medicine workforce. He earned a Doctorate in Public Health from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and had studied economics during his formative years at the University of Virginia and at William&Mary -- his alma-mater. Coming to Family Medicine and Primary Care research, he is fortunate to count many kind, generous, and inspirational persons as mentors and colleagues along the way. It has been a long time since running his first SAS program on healthcare data as a gangly summer-intern at the then-Naval Medical Information Management Center in Bethesda, resulting in reams of printed paper because he forgot to suppress output, to the annoyance of the printing staff downstairs.

Rural Prisons and County Health Statistics, Part 2

By | March 21, 2021
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In an earlier post, we showed how rural prisons and census methods create distortions in county demographic and health statistics. In this post, we add further evidence and discuss the economic, political, and research implications of these potentially misleading data. National survey methodology may contribute to inaccurate data Census policy coupled with national survey methodology… Read More »

Rural Prisons Create Risk of Miscalculating County Health Statistics

By | March 10, 2021
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The 2020 Census is complete and the results will be released soon. Because of how we count people in prison, there may be inaccurate demographics and a virtual overestimate of people living and accessing services in rural communities. In this two-part series, we look at how rural prisons can skew county-level analyses of rural demographics… Read More »