The American Public Health Association Endorses Single-Payer Health System Reform.

Health care is a human right. Achieving universal health insurance coverage for all US residents requires significant system-wide reform. The most equitable and cost-effective health care system is a public, single-payer (SP) system. The rapid growth in national health expenditures can be addressed through a system that yields net savings over projected trends by eliminating profit and waste. With universal health insurance coverage through SP financing, providers can focus on optimizing delivery of services, rather than working within a system covered by payers who have incentives to limit costs regardless of benefit. Rather, with a SP, the people act as their own insurer through a partnership with provider organizations where tax dollars work for everyone. Consumer choice is then based on the best care to meet need with no out-of-pocket payments. SP financing is the best option to ensure equity, fairness, and public health priorities align with medical needs, providing incentives for wellness. Consumer choice will drive market forces, not provider network profits or insurer restrictions. This approach benefits public health, as everyone will have universal access to needed care, with treatment plans developed by providers based on what works best for the patient. In 2021, the American Public Health Association adopted a policy statement calling for comprehensive reforms to implement a SP system. The proposed action steps in this policy will help build a healthier nation, saving lives and reducing wasted health care expenditures while addressing inequities rooted in social, demographic, mental health, economic, and political determinants.

How we developed a locally focused Global Health Clinical Preceptorship at Weill Cornell Medical College.

BACKGROUND: Global health educational programs within U.S. medical schools have the opportunity to link their "global" focus with local circumstances by examining the challenges underserved communities face in the United States. AIM: Students in Weill Cornell Medical College's Global Health Clinical Preceptorship (GHCP) learn history-taking and physical examination skills while gaining exposure to local health care disparities and building cultural competency. METHODS: First-year medical students in the program are placed in the office of a physician who works with underserved patient populations in New York City. Students receive an orientation session, shadow their preceptors one afternoon per week for seven weeks, complete weekly readings and assignments on topics specific to underserved populations, attend a reflection session, and write a reflection paper. RESULTS: In three years, 36% of first-year students (112 of 311) opted into the elective GHCP program. Students reported gaining a better understanding of the needs of underserved patient populations, being exposed to new languages and issues of cultural competency, and having the opportunity to work with role model clinicians. CONCLUSIONS: The GHCP is a successful example of how global health programs within medical schools can incorporate a domestic learning component into their curricula.

Teaching medical students about different health care systems: an international exchange program.

Understanding how different health care systems are organized and financed is rarely taught in medical school. In 1997, several U.S. and European medical schools formed an ongoing, innovative, and collaborative exchange program to enable their medical students to gain an insight into the dynamics of another country's health care system. One student from each participating institution completes a month-long rotation at a host medical school under the supervision of a faculty mentor. Selected target diagnoses serve as the basis for comparative case studies. To enable the student to effectively study the host country's health care system, each is assigned a patient with the preselected specific diagnosis. The students view the patient's care within the context of the host country's delivery system rather than being limited to the clinical diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Matching the student with a patient permits the student to see how medical care is delivered and financed in the host country. Each student is required to prepare a written report focusing on costs; organization and delivery of care; quality and outcomes of care; politics, culture, and ethics; and learning. The case studies permit comparisons of health care systems among the participating U.S. and European Union countries, as well as opportunities for institutional and individual learning.

Teaching about the changing U.S. health care system: an innovative clerkship.

Changes in the U.S. health care system have necessitated modifying the scope and content of existing courses in the medical school curricula. In 1996, the Weill Medical College of Cornell University created a new, integrated public health curriculum to reflect the changes in the ways that medical care is organized, financed, and delivered. Teaching medical students to understand the constantly changing health care system is a primary objective of the new curriculum. As part of this curriculum, the medical college instituted a required public health clerkship that focused on the health care system, to be taken in either the third or fourth year. Students are prepared for the clerkship by taking courses in epidemiology, biostatistics, and evidence-based medicine in the first year and an introduction to the health system in the second year. The two-week clerkship, which may be unique in U.S. medical education, seeks to present an in-depth exposure to issues in health care financing and delivery by means of lectures, panel discussions with experts in the field, seminars, and field assignments to health care organizations and agencies.

A practice-profiling system for residents.

Providers are increasingly evaluated and measured as part of quality, credentialling, and reimbursement programs, an approach often used by managed care organizations. However, these evaluations are rarely used in residency training, meaning that physicians entering practice have little experience or understanding of these measures. To address this issue, in 1998 the authors successfully developed a three-part practice-profiling system for internal medicine residents at their institution that includes measures of patient satisfaction, disease-management profiles for diabetes and hypertension, and an Internet-based faculty-evaluation program. The patient-satisfaction profile utilizes a ten-question patient survey that emphasizes physician-patient communication issues. The diabetes and hypertension disease-management profiles use the resident's own patients to profile process and outcome measures for common chronic ambulatory conditions. The faculty-evaluation profile is conducted over the Internet, and allows the resident to compare faculty evaluations with those of his or her peer group. Residents receive the profiles as a packet in a scheduled session with a faculty supervisor twice each year. A total of 120 residents are profiled annually for the above measures. Residents rated the program very highly, and found the profiling program to be instructive and effective feedback. As payers and regulators increasingly use physician profiling, residents will benefit from learning the strengths and weaknesses of profiling systems early in their training.

Perspectives on the changing healthcare system: teaching systems-based practice to medical residents.

PURPOSE: The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education restructured its accreditation system to be based on educational outcomes in six core competencies. Systems-based practice is one of the six core competencies. The purpose of this report is to describe Weill Cornell Medical College's Internal Medicine Residency program curriculum for systems-based practice (SBP) and its evaluation process. METHODS: To examine potential outcomes of the POCHS curriculum, an evaluation was conducted, examining participants': (1) knowledge gain; (2) course ratings; and (3) qualitative feedback. RESULTS: On average, there was a 19 percentage point increase in knowledge test scores for all three cohorts. The course was rated overall highly, receiving an average of 4.6 on a 1-5 scale. Lastly, the qualitative comments supported that the material is needed and valued. CONCLUSION: The course, entitled Perspectives on the Changing Healthcare System (POCHS) and its evaluation process support that systems-based practice is crucial to residency education. The course is designed not only to educate residents about the current health care system but also to enable them to think critically about the risk and benefits of the changes. POCHS provides a framework for teaching and assessing this competency and can serve as a template for other residency programs looking to create or restructure their SBP curriculum.

The global health curriculum of Weill Cornell Medical College: how one school developed a global health program.

Since 2009, a multidisciplinary team at Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC) has collaborated to create a comprehensive, elective global health curriculum (GHC) for medical students. Increasing student interest sparked the development of this program, which has grown from ad hoc lectures and dispersed international electives into a comprehensive four-year elective pathway with over 100 hours of training, including three courses, two international experiences, a preceptorship with a clinician working with underserved populations in New York City, and regular lectures and seminars by visiting global health leaders. Student and administrative enthusiasm has been strong: In academic years 2009, 2010, and 2011, over half of the first-year students (173 of 311)participated in some aspect of the GHC, and 18% (55 of 311) completed all first-year program requirements.The authors cite the student-driven nature of GHC as a major factor in its success and rapid growth. Also important was the foundation previously established by WCMC global health faculty, the serendipitous timing of the GHC's development in the midst of curricular reform and review, as well as the presence of a full-time, nonclinical Global Health Fellow who served as a program coordinator. Given the enormous expansion of medical student interest in global health training throughout the United States and Canada over the past decade, the authors hope that medical schools developing similar programs will find the experience at Weill Cornell informative and helpful.

From treatment to prevention: the interplay between HIV/AIDS treatment availability and HIV/AIDS prevention programming in Khayelitsha, South Africa.

There is a paucity of research that illustrates the interplay between HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention programs. We describe the central role that public access to antiretroviral (ARV) medication has played in the development and efficacy of HIV/AIDS prevention programming in Khayelitsha, a resource-poor township in the Western Cape of South Africa. We document the range of preventive interventions and services available in Khayelitsha since the early 1990s and explore the impact of ARV availability on prevention efforts and disease stigma on the basis of extensive indepth interviews, supplemented by data collection. The information gathered suggests that the introduction of the mother-to-child-transmission (MTCT) prevention programs in 1999 and the three HIV treatment clinics run by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in 2000 were turning points in the region's response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. These programs have provided incentives for HIV testing, galvanized HIV/AIDS educators to reach populations most at risk, and decreased the HIV incidence rates in Khayeltisha compared to other areas in the Western Cape. Lessons learned in Khayelitsha about the value of treatment availability in facilitating prevention efforts can inform the development of comprehensive approaches to HIV/AIDS in other resource-poor areas.

Medicare financing of graduate medical education.

The past decade has seen ongoing debate regarding federal support of graduate medical education, with numerous proposals for reform. Several critical problems with the current mechanism are evident on reviewing graduate medical education (GME) funding issues from the perspectives of key stakeholders. These problems include the following: substantial interinstitutional and interspecialty variations in per-resident payment amounts; teaching costs that have not been recalibrated since 1983; no consistent control by physician educators over direct medical education (DME) funds; and institutional DME payments unrelated to actual expenditures for resident education or to program outcomes. None of the current GME reform proposals adequately address all of these issues. Accordingly, we recommend several fundamental changes in Medicare GME support. We propose a re-analysis of the true direct costs of resident training (with appropriate adjustment for local market factors) to rectify the myriad problems with per-resident payments. We propose that Medicare DME funds go to the physician organization providing resident instruction, keeping DME payments separate from the operating revenues of teaching hospitals. To ensure financial accountability, we propose that institutions must maintain budgets and report expenditures for each GME program. To establish educational accountability, Residency Review Committees should establish objective, annually measurable standards for GME program performance; programs that consistently fail to meet these minimum standards should lose discretion over GME funds. These reforms will solve several long-standing, vexing problems in Medicare GME funding, but will also uncover the extent of undersupport of GME by most other health care payers. Ultimately, successful reform of GME financing will require "all-payer" support.