Tag Archives: Health Disparities

Reducing the Harms of Substance Use: Lessons From Abroad

By | July 4, 2023

The way we’re addressing substance use and overdoses in the United States isn’t working. Let’s be perfectly clear: the “war on drugs” isn’t, and never was, really a war on drugs. It’s been a war waged on communities who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). The war on drugs started well before President… Read More »

Improving Home and Community-Based Services for People with Dementia

Over the past 25 years, significant strides have been made in shifting services for people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease to home and community settings. Home and community-based services (HCBS) enable people with various forms of dementia to receive care in a familiar setting while promoting their independence, well-being, and overall quality of life. As… Read More »

Designing From the Margins to Advance Equity

By | May 2, 2023

“Access for the sake of access or inclusion is not necessarily liberatory, but access done in the service of love, justice, connection, and community is liberatory and has the power to transform.” – Mia Mingus, community organizer, disability and transformative justice advocate  Are you designing with equity and inclusion in mind? For public health and… Read More »

The Power of Data – Takeaways from the 2021 All In National Meeting

By | December 10, 2021

“You can’t improve what you don’t measure” is a common phrase highlighting the importance and power of data. Indeed, the importance of data was the central theme of the 2021 All In National Meeting. In case you’re unfamiliar, the host of the national meeting is All In: Data for Community Health: a learning network of… Read More »

Downstream Efforts to Address Social Determinants in the CMS Financial Alignment Initiative

In our last blog post, we discussed the Biden Administration’s infrastructure package as an example of an upstream policy effort that could promote equity and help address disparities. However, as we pointed out in the first in this series of blogs, stakeholders who interact with community members are best suited to identify social risk factors… Read More »

Parent Perspectives on Birth Equity – Birth Equity Series Part 3

In the United States, 700 women die every year from often preventable pregnancy or childbirth complications. An additional 60,000 more experience highly preventable birth injuries. Black women are three times more likely to die from those complications than white women. According to the CDC, the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. is roughly 17.4 maternal… Read More »

Words Matter in Creating Birth Equity – Birth Equity Series Part 2

While some health outcomes improve in the United States, racial and ethnic disparities in pregnancy-related outcomes persist. In the United States, Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related complication than white women. In Kansas, Black women are more than three times as likely to die of pregnancy-related complications compared to… Read More »

Defining Birth Equity in Kansas – Birth Equity Series Part 1

The pace of progress is never fast enough for those who stand to suffer the biggest losses. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the glaring health inequities impacting Black mothers and babies in Kansas. Among the multitude of injustices Black Kansans face today, the disproportionate rates of death and devastating health complications for Black… Read More »

The Long Arm of Redlining: Health Inequities in the Digital Divide

Medical care is sometimes, though not on this blog, viewed as the gold standard to address inequities. However, access to medical care only accounts for an estimated 10-20% of the modifiable factors that affect population health. The other 80-90% of modifiable factors are often referred to as social determinants of health (SDOH). These are the… Read More »

The Uncertainty of Black Pregnant Women and COVID-19 Vaccines

In March 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed COVID-19 as a pandemic. More than 18 months later, the nation has yet to return to ‘normal’. Hope for normalcy increased with the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in the months that followed. Reluctance and resistance to vaccination, however, have made it difficult to… Read More »

Tracking Community Benefit Spending

By | August 31, 2021

Nonprofit hospitals make up the majority of hospitals in the US. In exchange for their tax-exempt status, the federal government requires these hospitals to provide support in the form of community benefits.  Tracking community benefit spending and its impact is important to ensure that such spending aligns with community needs. Community benefit activities can include… Read More »

Challenges to Adopting COVID-19 Monoclonal Antibody Treatment

By | July 15, 2021

The pandemic has highlighted the challenge health care providers face in translating new scientific findings to actual patient care. The integration of COVID-19 monoclonal antibody treatment is a good example of this challenge. Frustration at a Local Hospital In a year of difficult days, my mom came home from work one evening in March especially… Read More »

Turning From Obstetric Violence to Birth Justice

By | July 7, 2021

The US maternal mortality rate is higher than it was a quarter of a century ago. For every one person that dies, another 65 almost die. We do not adequately care for mothers and mothers-to-be. Not only that, but as providers, we inadvertently (and at times overtly) inflict obstetric violence, through both individual actions and our… Read More »

Infrastructure investments, SDOH, and equity

The Biden Administration’s proposed infrastructure investments are an example of an upstream effort to address disparities related to social determinants of health (SDOH). As mentioned in our previous blog post, SDOH are the conditions or circumstances within which people live, and these differ based on the distribution of power, money, and resources. The systems and… Read More »

Social determinants of health: Language nuance matters

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines social determinants of health (SDOH) as the non-medical factors that influence health outcomes. They are the “conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age.” Currently, SDOH is a hot topic as stakeholders try new ways to improve individual and population health, achieve health equity, and reduce… Read More »

The Complexity of COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution in Rural Areas

During the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted health inequality created by social determinants of health (SDoH) in the United States. SDoH include all aspects of the living environment, social support, safety, well-being, and resource availability, directly or indirectly influencing physical health outcomes. Consideration of SDoH is critical for successful comprehensive COVID-19 vaccine rollout.… Read More »

Public Health and Medicine Are Essential Partners in Advancing Health

By | November 30, 2020

Historically, public health has served the nation through sanitation, immunization, and other disease-prevention activities (e.g., disease tracking and quarantine). For example, public health developed wastewater treatment programs to help fight typhoid fever during the industrial revolution. It also helped educate the public (and the food industry) on safely preparing and preserving foods. As a result,… Read More »

Health Equity: Lessons from AcademyHealth 2020

By | September 21, 2020

Health equity and the disparities within our health care system were the predominant themes at AcademyHealth’s 2020 Annual Research Meeting (ARM), which concluded on August 6th. As usual, health services researchers gathered to disseminate the latest evidence across a broad range of health care topics and discuss the most pressing issues in health services research… Read More »

Beyond Evidence Reporting: Evidence Translation in an Era of Uncertainty

For decades, peer-reviewed journals have been a critical pathway for disseminating and advancing scientific knowledge. However, curbing the spread of misinformation requires evidence translation by experts into plain English. The rapidly evolving knowledge base on COVID-19 shines a spotlight on the issue. For example, a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine offered… Read More »

Can Technology Help Reduce Health Disparities?

Health and health care disparities are frustratingly persistent. This is widely known, in great part, because of the landmark report Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care that then spurred the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to track and report on disparities for 250 measures since the early 2000s. The… Read More »

Core Principles of Health Equity

By | April 11, 2019

I have been lucky enough in my career so far to visit communities around the United States to support public health efforts. While every community is different, one experience has remained the same: I am an outsider, and often a privileged one at that. Working across so many communities has given me a lot of… Read More »

Street Medicine—a home for high quality medical care for people experiencing homelessness

“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 »

The Desire to Avoid Pregnancy Scale: A new way to measure pregnancy preferences

Why do we care about unintended pregnancies? Rates of unintended pregnancy “indicate the extent to which women and couples can determine freely whether and when they have children,” as stated by Finer and Zolna. There is some evidence that women and girls who have unintended pregnancies have a higher likelihood of other risk factors, such as… Read More »

Hospitalizations of Individuals Experiencing Homelessness Driven by Behavioral Health Concerns

By | February 6, 2019

Individuals experiencing homelessness are among the most medically, socially, economically, and politically vulnerable in our society. Because of this, patterns of service use by these individuals can often serve as indicators of the safety net capacity and overall wellness of the systems of care we have in place – like “canaries in the coal mine.”… Read More »

Instead of Building a Wall, Let’s Insure America’s Children

By | January 7, 2019

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 »

Addressing addiction at the local level

By | November 9, 2017

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 »

The Prevention and Public Health Fund: Investing in Health Equity

By | July 27, 2017

The pursuit of health equity – ensuring equal access to opportunities that enable all communities to lead healthy lives – is a critical task for the U.S. The direct and indirect medical costs associated with sickness and premature death resulting from health care inequities are enormous (estimated to be $230 billion and $1.24 trillion, respectively,… Read More »

The Childhood Roots of Health Inequity: Part 4 – Dr. Jennifer Manly

By | April 27, 2017

This post is the final one in our 4-part series focusing on presentations that were delivered at a special panel session at APHA16 on the childhood roots of health inequity [part 1, part 2, part 3]. Our fourth presenter, Dr. Jennifer Manly, is Associate Professor of Neuropsychology in Neurology at the Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center and the… Read More »

Smoking cessation treatment among newly covered individuals under the ACA

By | April 12, 2017

Smoking cessation is not innovative or trendy or even particularly exciting, but as a primary care doctor, in most cases helping a patient quit smoking is the best thing that I can do to help that patient over their lifetime. Without question. And for that reason, I always make it a priority to talk about it… Read More »

Cost-Effectiveness of Antihypertensive Medication

By | April 4, 2017

Anytime I see the words “cost saving” in reference to a public health or medical intervention, my first thought is “Yeah, right!” It just doesn’t happen that often. One can spend more money to get better outcomes (or more care provided), or less money for worse outcomes, but rarely less money AND better outcomes. However,… Read More »

Do Not Repeal the ACA Without a Comparable Replacement

By | February 24, 2017

I once saw a breast cancer so advanced that the tumor had eroded through the woman’s chest wall. This wasn’t in a foreign country with little access to healthcare – it was in the city where I attended medical school: New Haven, Connecticut. The patient worked a full-time job and raised a family, but did… Read More »

Should Women Rush to Get IUDs Post-Election? They Should’ve Been Rushing all Along!

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 »

Economic Burden of the Opioid Epidemic

By | September 29, 2016

According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, in 2014, more than 240 million prescriptions were written for opioids, which is more than sufficient for each American adult to have one full bottle of opioids. Prescription drugs are second only to marijuana as the most abused category of drug in the United States. A recent article… Read More »

Racial and Ethnic Disparities after the ACA: Good News and Bad

By | June 9, 2016

The major goal of the Affordable Care Act was to expand health insurance coverage. The Department of Health and Human Services will tell you that the Affordable Care Act is working: more Americans are insured. About 16.4 million people gained insurance in the past five years. What do these numbers mean for racial and ethnic minorities who… Read More »