A new facility will offer medical and dental services targeting those with mental-health and addiction issues -- the first of its kind in Santa Barbara and the only one between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The goal of health care spending is to achieve good health results, and that requires measuring and rewarding success. Unfortunately, the measures likely to be used for the next stage of health reform won’t get us there.
Baltimore researchers spent three decades tracking nearly 800 kids from poor and middle-class backgrounds. They found little social mobility, with poor kids tending to become poor adults. The findings have sobering implications for health, which is tightly linked to socioeconomic status.
When a hospital closes in a low-income area, reporters often assume that the care was essential for the poor communities it was serving. But there are several problems with that assumption, including the equation that health equals health care.
Akron, Ohio's Accountable Care Community has brought together a coalition of partners to reduce the number of residents suffering from chronic disease and treatment costs. Similarly, nonprofit hospitals elsewhere can do much more to improve the health of entire communities.
How can a wider audience be engaged in the broad-ranging and often complex issues of population health? Ben Harris-Roxas, a health impact assessment consultant, has some suggestions.
The notion that health is influenced by societal factors has been around for generations. Rudolf Vicherow, known for his advancement of public health, is quoted famously for his 1841 declaration that “medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale”. The c
I was all set to write this post about how journalists could mine the burgeoning field of “health impact assessments” for stories when I noticed that Melissa Sweet of the excellent Croakey health policy blog already had written a great post on the topic. Drat.
Fortunately, Melissa was writing for Australians, so I still can add my two cents.
