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Meghan Ross

Sep 12 2022
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Philadelphia Inquirer: COVID-19 Showed the Benefits of At-Home Testing. A New Partnership Is Expanding Access to HIV Testing Kits

By In the News

From The Philadelphia Inquirer: Three Philadelphia community groups are joining forces to apply the COVID-19 pandemic’s lessons about the utility of at-home medical testing to HIV, a disease that has long presented its own challenges to screening efforts. Bebashi Transition to Hope, a nonprofit founded to serve people of color living with HIV, is collaborating with two grassroots organizations to distribute HIV self-testing kits to vulnerable populations in Philadelphia. Also involved are SistaTalkPHL, which serves single Black women, and Ark of Safety LGBTQ+ Safe Haven, focused on members of the LGBTQ community who are experiencing homelessness. Together, the groups aim to…

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Sep 06 2022
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NPR: 4 Ways To Make Your Workout Actually Fun, According to Behavioral Scientists

By In the News

From NPR: Last December, Michael Garcia started going to his local Dave & Buster’s in Gaithersburg, Md., to play an arcade game called Pump It Up. Players move their bodies to the rhythm of the music as colored arrows light up on a platform beneath their feet. As the levels advance, the beats get faster and more complicated. Before long, Garcia, 26, was hooked. He used to play the game for just an hour or two a week – but these days, he’s just as likely to play all day. “Saturday, I stayed here for 8 hours,” he says. “I even brought a…

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Sep 02 2022
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The Conversation: One Way To Help College Students Get Enough Sleep – Pay Them To Go to Bed

By In the News

From The Conversation: Author: Osea Giuntella Small financial incentives can get college students to go to bed earlier and sleep significantly longer. That’s what my colleagues and I found through an experiment that involved 508 students at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Oxford. When the students were offered US$7.50 per night Monday through Thursday – a total of $30 per week – to sleep longer, they were 13% more likely than those who were not offered the incentive to sleep seven to nine hours. They were also 16% less likely to sleep fewer than six hours. We collected data from…

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Aug 31 2022
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Medpage Today: Improving HF Treatment After Hospital Discharge: Some Surprising Findings

By In the News

From Medpage Today: The aging population in the United States has contributed to the increasing number of individuals with heart failure and a subsequent 26% increase in hospitalizations for heart failure. This places a large burden on patients themselves and the healthcare system. Addressing ways to manage patients’ medication, diets and weight management, follow-up care, and counseling on other lifestyle changes in a timely fashion is key to improving heart failure and decreasing admissions secondary to heart failure. Using self-monitoring by patients, incentives for patient adherence, and use of technology for remote monitoring that can be sent directly to electronic health records (EHR)…

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Aug 31 2022
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Penn Today: Who Wants Government Health Care and Unemployment Programs To Expand?

By In the News

From Penn Today:  For many Americans, the COVID-19 pandemic was both frightening and financially devastating. Along with unrelenting worries about getting severely ill or dying from the virus—or inadvertently infecting others—millions of people lost their jobs and struggled to pay their rent, mortgage, and credit card bills. The federal government responded by providing vaccines along with more affordable and accessible health care, increased food and housing assistance, money for families with children, funds for small businesses and hospitals, and higher unemployment payments. How did individual experiences with COVID-19 affect Americans’ feelings about the federal safety net? Senior Leonard Davis Institute of Health…

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Aug 31 2022
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Penn Medicine News: How Health Systems Can Help Build Black Wealth

By In the News

From Penn Medicine News: Health systems can play important roles in helping Black communities build wealth, according to Penn Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) experts in a commentary published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. “Health systems have a choice to make: continue with the status quo or reposition themselves as essential actors in closing the racial wealth gap,” said Eugenia South, MD, the paper’s first author, an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and faculty director of Penn Medicine’s Urban Health Lab. “Large, sustained, societal investments are the only way to address the gap, and…

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Aug 29 2022
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Choiceology: Not by a Long Shot: With Guests Katia Jordan & Craig Fox

By In the News

From Choiceology: Humans can easily distinguish between a zero-chance event (e.g., the Washington Nationals winning the World Series in 2022) and a sure thing (e.g., the sun coming up tomorrow). But in between those two clear outcomes, it turns out that we’re not great at estimating odds. In this episode of Choiceology with Katy Milkman, a bias that affects the way we predict the likelihood of rare events. Katia Jordan had all the makings of a tennis star: a preternatural talent, an intense drive to succeed, top-tier coaches, and parents who supported her dream completely. She was certain that she would be the…

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Aug 24 2022
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heather schofield

Team to Study Income Volatility and Uncertainty on Mental Health and Wellbeing

By CHIBEblog

Could income instability increase the rate of aging and be detrimental to physical and psychological health among the poor? This is a question that a research team led by Assistant Professor of Health Policy Heather Schofield, PhD, will be examining, thanks to an R01 from the National Institute on Aging. The team was awarded $2.5 million for a four-year randomized controlled trial to study the consequences of income volatility and uncertainty on mental health, wellbeing, and biomarkers of stress. One of the difficulties people experiencing poverty have is not just a low income, but how unpredictable and unstable their earnings…

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Aug 19 2022
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Jalpa Doshi quote: “It is so gratifying to know that my team’s research and policy recommendations are definitely going to help approximately 3.5 million beneficiaries and millions of more in the future."

Inflation Reduction Act Includes Fix for Issues with Medicare Part D Design First Proposed by Penn Team

By CHIBEblog

President Joe Biden recently signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, and while much has been discussed about the various provisions of this Act, one of its underappreciated parts is the section on the changes to the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit design, according to Professor of Medicine and CHIBE Associate Director Jalpa Doshi, PhD. This section fixes issues with the Medicare Part D design that were highlighted by a team at the University of Pennsylvania led by Dr. Doshi. This team worked on a series of papers that demonstrated that patient out-of-pocket costs (that were “too much and…

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Aug 16 2022
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Healthcare Innovation: Health Policy Experts Issue New Challenge to Berwick and Gilfillan

By In the News

From Healthcare Innovation: Nearly a year has passed since Donald Berwick, M.D., and Rick Gilfillan, M.D., opened a full-frontal attack on Medicare Advantage (MA), in their September 30, 2021 blog in Health Affairs online entitled “Medicare Advantage, Direct Contracting, And the Medicare ‘Money Machine.’” That blog, which was actually the second of a two-part blog set, but was the one that captured nearly all the public attention, and indeed, it created a firestorm in federal healthcare policy circles. As we reported in a news article on that date, Dr. Berwick, who had served as Acting Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)…

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