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…
From Kaiser Permanente Spotlight: For adults newly diagnosed with diabetes, getting blood sugar levels under control is the first goal. Guidelines recommend diabetes medications to help patients meet their target blood sugar range. Yet a new Kaiser Permanente study found that adults of certain racial and ethnic groups are less likely to start medication within the first year of diagnosis. “We know there are race and ethnic disparities in diabetes-related health outcomes and that many factors contribute to these differences,” said the study’s co-lead author Anjali Gopalan, MD, MS, a research scientist at the Division of Research and a senior physician with The Permanente Medical…
From The New York Times: While the world’s attention was riveted on the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the fight against an older foe lost crucial ground: More than 1.5 million people became infected with H.I.V. last year, roughly three times the global target, the United Nations reported on Wednesday. Roughly 650,000 people died of AIDS in 2021, about one every minute, according to U.N.AIDS, the organization’s program on H.I.V. and AIDS. Progress against the disease has faltered, and global infections have held steady since 2018. The toll in 2021 was uneven, as people ages 15 to 24 years…
From STAT: Value-based care champions health and justice by focusing on outcomes rather than on units of service. As this type of payment reform expands, implementing the necessary changes to enable it must operate from a frame of equity rather than equality. Working toward equality means giving different groups the same opportunities, while working towards equity means giving different groups different opportunities according to their needs. Health equity requires recognizing that systems of care are yielding different results for different populations due to underlying systemic differences, so the solutions to improving health and health care need to be different as well. The commitment to reducing care disparities for populations…
From WHYY: Samantha Greenberg said she was overcome with emotion when she saw an Instagram post about a COVID-19 vaccine clinic for kids under 5 at the Dr. Ala Stanford Center for Health Equity in North Philadelphia. While many Americans returned to their pre-pandemic lives months ago, Greenberg — who has a 14-month-old daughter, Gemma — and other parents of young, unvaccinated children have remained more cautious. Greenberg said her family has largely avoided social gatherings, and Gemma rarely went on a playdate or inside public buildings. “We started going to the playground a couple of weeks ago,” Greenberg said….
