In this month’s podcast, co-editor Jess Williams recaps blog posts from November and talks about some December journal articles. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcription
Welcome back to Healthy Intersections, the podcast of themedicalcareblog.com. In this month’s episode, I’ll review some of our blog entries from November and give you a preview of some exciting articles in the December issue.
Emily Gillen and coauthors wrote an interesting blog about a possible driver of disparities in telehealth utilization. They use evidence from a variety of sources to make the case that limited internet access is one of the main drivers of telehealth use disparities. Broadband access is critically important, not only for health care but for schools, emergency services, and many other jobs. Dr. Gillen and her coauthors find that households with lower income have lower rates of internet subscriptions and that areas with higher proportions of Medicaid residents or a higher percentage of minoritzed households also have lower rates of internet access.
The authors didn’t look at rurality but other work has shown internet access in rural areas as well. While keeping the provider flexibility started during the public health emergency is important, more work needs to be done to make sure that this access doesn’t reinforce existing inequalities. OF course, the ways to address these disparities in broadband access will be different for different areas. If you are interested in this topic I suggest you check out Dr. Gillen’s blog as well as Broadband USA and the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program.
In another entry last month Matthew Toth and Lauren Palmer wrote about care coordination for individuals who are eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare, colloquially referred to as dual eligibles. Dually eligible individuals tend to be vulnerable and have a high level of medical need. Because of their dually eligible status, they often have extreme challenges accessing care and coordinating care across programs. The blog last month discussed some newly introduced reforms to help address the fragmented payment and delivery system for dually eligible beneficiaries. For a fantastic discussion of state demonstration programs and the specifics of the reforms, head over to the blog.
We’ve had many entries over the years about the importance of reproductive healthcare and long-acting reversible contraception. In November, Lisa Lines and Christina Fowler published a post on how state abortion bans are affecting reproductive healthcare for women and described how Long-acting reversible contraception may especially benefit women in states that are now hostile to abortion rights. They discuss how stigma and cost-sharing may reduce LARC use and give some suggestions for providers including that they should talk to male patients about their need for contraception.
December Journal Article Preview
There are also some great articles in this month’s journal. Matthew Alcusky has an editorial about psychosocial data and its rapid integration into electronic health records. He also discusses the current and possible uses of natural language processing to access unstructured data from health records.
Another interesting paper this month compares Medicare Advantage Star Ratings with racial and ethnic disparities in hospitalizations for ambulatory-care-sensitive conditions. We’ll be chatting with the author, Sungchul Park on another podcast–but go check out the article in the meantime.
Delving further into disparities in care, an article in the December issue uses Medicare consumer survey data to see whether disparities in patient experiences between non-Hispanic white and Hispanics varies by language preference taking the language used for the survey into account. Hispanic people with Medicare experience disparities in patient care relative to non-Hispanic White English-preferring counterparts. Hispanic Spanish-preferring English respondents report the worst experiences, followed by Hispanic English-preferring respondents. Hispanic Spanish respondents experienced the least disparities of the three Hispanic language subgroups. Check out the article to learn more.
Other great articles this month include ones on predicting fragmented care, strategies to enhance response rates for patient surveys, and naloxone prescribing in the military health system among others. Head over to the journal website to read more.
Thank you for tuning in this month to Healthy Intersections. Happy reading!
Jess Williams