Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The Urban Institute has an interesting report titled Obesity Across America. Being overweight (BMS>25), obese (BMI>30) or severely obese (BMI>40) is very common in the U.S. with three quarters of individuals being overweight and nearly half obese. Obesity varies by race and ethnicity as well. Black adults are more likely to live with obesity than…
New Year’s Eve is a day with significant alcohol consumed. In fact, New Year’s Eve falls behind only Mardi Gras in terms of the number of drinks consumed for that holiday. According to the National Institute of Health, excess alcohol consumption has a number health consequences including impacts on the brain, heart (increased risk of…
According to a study Bovell-Ammon et al. (2021) in JAMA Open, the answer is ‘yes’. The authors use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), which tracks a nationally representative cohort of noninstitutionalized youths aged 15 to 22 years in 1979 through 2018. The authors used cumulative incidence function estimates to compare Blacks…
Bierman et al. (2021) defines multiple chronic conditions (MCC) are as “the co-occurrence of two or more chronic physical or mental health conditions”. Why do policymakers, payers and clinicians care so much about patients with MCC? One in three American adults, four in five Medicare beneficiaries, and a growing number of children have MCC. People…
Research by D. Mark Anderson, Kerwin Kofi Charles & Daniel I. Rees in the NBER report provides some useful graphs looking at how various public health interventions have impacted health outcomes in the U.S over the last century. Specifically, the authors show that public health interventions aimed at improving the health of the municipal water…
That is the finding from a white paper from the Schizophrenia and Psychosis Action Alliance titled “Societal Costs of Schizophrenia & Related Disorders“. I am a co-author on the paper. Below is a summary of the findings: …the societal costs of schizophrenia were estimated to be $281.6 billion in 2020…Direct costs for individuals living with…
Cell and gene therapies have the potential to produce dramatic improvements in quality of life and survival for severe and often rare diseases. Currently, however, the cost of these treatments is high and access is sometimes limited. To identify some of these challenges in Europe EURODIS conducted an evaluation of country-specific challenges with respect to…
I will be on a panel tomorrow for the Wall Street Journal‘s Global Food Forum. My panel will include and Hakim Bouzamondo (Divisional VP, Global Research and Development, Nutrition at Abbott) and Dr. Leah Gramlich, (Gastroenterologist and Physician Nutrition Specialist at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Alberta Canada) as well as myself. This discussion will…
That is one approach being explored in Philadelphia according to an article in Kaiser Health News. Using funding from Temple University, two Pennsylvania Medicaid health plans, and some grant funding, the Template University Health System: …launched a two-year program last year to help 25 homeless Medicaid patients who frequently use its emergency room and other…
There has been a lot of hype about patient-centeredness, but what concrete steps can be taken to make sure the end user–the patient–has significant input into today’s health care system? A recent paper by Oehrlein et al. (2020) provides 18 concrete recommendations to follow. Below, I highlight just a few of these. Plain language communication:…