From Northwestern NOW: The team of scientists — originally at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) but now at Northwestern University and Stony Brook University — began working with Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services in 2012 to incorporate the use of trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy, an evidence-based treatment for young people with PTSD, across the city’s behavioral health system. The study was successful in two ways: First, patients who received the trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy saw their PTSD symptoms decline an average of 30% from baseline to termination. But the overarching success of the study was in…
From US News: “There’s often not much time, and clinicians have a lot to cover. Patients come in with things they want to discuss,” said Dr. Shivan Mehta, a gastroenterologist and associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. But Mehta, who studies health care delivery, also pointed to the good news. “We do know a lot about ways around these barriers,” he said. Essentially, clinics and health care systems have to step in, so screening reminders are not solely the job of individual doctors. That, Mehta said, can be done with messages sent over electronic patient portals, or by texting —…
From MedPage Today: In a commentary accompanying the study, Kimberly Waddell, PhD, MSc, and Shivan Mehta, MD, both of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, said that an opt-out approach “is not a universal solution to low cancer screening rates.” While they will be most effective in improving behaviors that aren’t too complex or intensive, Waddell and Mehta noted that in this case, the study location did not offer onsite mammogram screening and had to coordinate scheduling with non-VA healthcare facilities. “One can imagine that scheduling and completing a mammogram in a different health system creates additional steps on the behavioral…
From Penn Medicine News: Why can’t health care be like so many other aspects of life: easy, convenient, and efficient? At Penn Medicine, efforts to rethink and simplify the care process are doing just that. “Penn is really focused on thinking about efficiency for health care workers across every spectrum,” from clinicians to frontline staff to those who work behind the scenes, said UPHS Vice President Raina Merchant, MD, MSHP, Penn Medicine’s chief transformation officer, associate vice president, and director of the Center for Health Care Transformation and Innovation. “We’re trying to reduce repetitive tasks to make the work that employees are…
From Northwestern University Feinberg News Center: Electronic health record-based messages delivered solely to clinicians increased referral to tobacco use treatment for cancer patients who smoke, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. “The motivation behind this study is to close the gap between what we know and what we do in oncology care related to an evidence-based practice: tobacco cessation treatment,” Rinad Beidas, PhD, the chair and Ralph Seal Paffenbarger Professor of Medical Social Sciences and a co-author of the study. […] Brian Jenssen, MD, MSHP, assistant professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, and Frank…
From BBC: For the first time in six years, Target announced a sales drop: a decline of 5% in the April to June 2023 period, compared with the same time in 2022. During that time, the big-box retailer was also embroiled in a controversy over their collection of merchandise for Pride Month, which spurred consumer backlash and boycotts from some politically conservative shoppers. Coincidence? Perhaps not, said Christina Hennington, Target’s executive vice president, on the company’s Q2 2023 earnings call. She attributed the sales decline in part to a “strong reaction to this year’s Pride assortment” that affected store traffic, and also cut…
From the Washington Post: When doctors and health-care providers “prescribed” fruits and vegetables, patients ate more produce, lost weight and experienced significant reductions in blood pressure, according to a new study. “Produce prescriptions” are part of a growing effort in health care to provide food as medicine to potentially prevent or improve chronic health conditions like obesity, diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure. In what is believed to be the largest study of these programs, researchers studied 3,881 people from low-income neighborhoods who received food vouchers through nine programs in a dozen states, from California to Florida. The participants received vouchers…
From The Hill: By Aaron Richterman, Christina Roberto and Harsha Thirumurthy Early in the pandemic, unforgettable images of long lines at food pantries across the U.S. became common as the American hunger crisis surged into full public view. These lines eased in part because of the largest-ever increase to payments by the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The extra $100 or more a month that many families got kept them fed at a time when food prices were soaring from inflation. In March 2023, the federal government ended these higher payments, and our new research shows why hungry Americans are once again…
From CNN: On weekdays, my alarm goes off at 4:15 a.m., and my husband and I immediately hop out of bed. I chug a bit of water from the bottle on my nightstand, brush my teeth, put on my workout clothes and make our workout electrolyte drinks while he gets his work bag prepped. We hop in the car to head to the gym for our 5 a.m. weightlifting workout class. We get back home around 6:15 a.m. and split the mealtime prep: My husband makes our protein-packed breakfast while I pack his lunch for the day and feed our…
From WHYY: People who get financial help to buy food and groceries through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program saw an increase in their monthly benefit amounts during the COVID-19 pandemic. But after the emergency allotments stopped following the end of state and national public health emergencies earlier this year, an estimated 2 million more Americans faced food insufficiency, according to a new study by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “Our research shows that increasing the benefit size can be very powerful,” Dr. Aaron Richterman said. But once benefits were reduced, Richterman said about one…