NEWTON CENTRE, Mass. -- Silversword, LLC, of Newton Centre, Massachusetts, has been awarded the IT management and maintenance for Project Hope's new four-story community center in Dorchester, MA. The facility will allow Project Hope, a nonprofit organization that works with impoverished families, to expand educational and housing services to better...
Despite widespread insurance coverage for adult vaccinations, cancer screening, and cardiovascular disease prevention measures, most U.S. adults are not up to date with these routine services. This paper reports the efforts of Sickness Prevention Achieved through Regional Collaboration SPARC, a New England - based organization working to broaden delivery of...
Local health information can be a powerful vehicle for improving the health of a community. It can highlight both the existence of problems and opportunities for improvement. It can also guide local action in support of policy changes and improve programs' effectiveness. However, efforts to expand the availability and use...
Evidence-based approaches those explicitly linked to the best available scientific evidence and reflecting community preferences and feasibility are increasingly used to inform health policy decision making on the burden of a disease attributable to particular causes, interventions and policies that might work to confront those causes, and issues of community...
Insufficient attention has been given to the ethical and legal questions surrounding mandatory evacuation in disasters and emergencies. This paper argues mandatory evacuation orders entail a governmental duty both to provide for people and to decide for people: Government must trigger the provision of critical resources as well as vigorous...
More than four years after September 11, 2001, bioterrorism preparedness remains a high priority for federal, state, and local governments. With reasonably flexible federal funding, communities have strengthened their ability to respond to public health emergencies, according to assessments by stakeholders and market observers. Collaborative relationships developed for bioterrorism preparedness...
The public health system represents a wide variety of actors playing key roles in the ongoing script to improve the quality and quantity of life for the U.S. population. The specific parts that public health is being asked to play and the resources available to support its infrastructure for prevention...
The dominant issues for health and health care modern day times can be effectively engaged only if public health and medicine work together as better partners. Yet historical, professional, organizational, operational, and financial barriers exist to closer relationships. Fostering the necessary collaboration will require changes for both public health and...
Globalization is likely to affect many aspects of public health, one of which is vaccine-preventable communicable diseases. Important forces include increased funding initiatives supporting immunization at the global level; regulatory harmonization; widespread intellectual property rights provisions through the World Trade Organization agreements; the emergence of developing-country manufacturers as major players...
Proponents of Health Savings Accounts HSAs contend that they will reduce medical expenditures. In practice, however, the effect of HSAs, and the high-deductible health plans that must accompany them, will depend on the actual provisions of those plans and of the plans they replace. This paper shows that typical plans...
Many states have "Prudent layperson" mandates that require health plans to reimburse hospitals for Emergency Department ED care delivered to patients who believe that they have symptoms warranting emergency treatment. Increased, and possibly unnecessary, ED use has often been attributed to these policies. Data has been used from thirty-five states...
Recent revelations of unexpected side effects of widely prescribed medications have raised questions about several aspects of U.S. drug policy, from initial Food and Drug Administration FDA approval to promotion by manufacturers and prescribing by physicians. One prominent example is nesiritide Natrecor, a treatment for congestive heart failure. In this...
In the United States, more money is spent on treating diseases and their complications than on preventing them in the first place. Prevention is both undervalued and poorly supported in the health system. This paper discusses how the McKinlay model can be used to illustrate the three levels at which...
The foreign-born represent a disproportionate share of nonelderly U.S. adults without health insurance. Using data from Los Angeles County, this report finds that most of the insurance disparities between the foreign-born and native-born can be explained by traditional socioeconomic factors. Undocumented immigrants, however, have lower rates of coverage, both private...
Computerized Physician Order Entry CPOE has been shown to reduce preventable, potential adverse events. Despite this evidence, fewer than 5 percent of U.S. hospitals have fully implemented these systems. This paper assesses empirically alternative reasons for low CPOE implementation using data from various sources. It finds that CPOE is related...
Although the impacts of carve-outs to Managed Behavioral Health Care Organizations MBHOs and parity mandates on costs are largely settled in the literature, their impacts on access are less clear. This article reexamines a study published by Samuel Zuvekas and colleagues in this journal, which found that the number of...
Reforms for slowing the growth in health care spending and increasing the value of care have largely focused on insurance-based solutions. Consumer-driven health care represents the example of this approach. However, much of the growth in health care spending over the past twenty years is linked to modifiable population risk...
Throughout the postwar era in federal health policy, policymakers have sought to expand both public and private insurance coverage, while wrestling with the cost consequences of the demand generated by the insurance-financing mechanisms thus created. This report advances the view that the limits to insurance expansion have been reached and...
Dissatisfaction with the U.S. health care system is widespread, but no consensus has emerged as to how to reform it. The principal methods of finance, employer-based insurance, means-tested insurance, and Medicare, are deeply and irreparably flawed. Policymakers confront two fundamental questions: Should reform be incremental or comprehensive? And should priority...
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