Doctors Who Attend Policy School: Who Are They and Where Do They Work?

Many physicians are pursuing additional advanced degrees, though no study has evaluated the characteristics and career choices of physicians who have pursued graduate policy degrees. We therefore searched employment and alumni data from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in addition to publicly available information to identify physicians who graduated with a policy degree from 1964 to 2002. We identified 258 physicians with policy degrees and found that they are increasing in number, though females are underrepresented when compared to the female physician workforce; likely to pursue clinical training in specialties highly proximate to public policy challenges, with most physicians remaining medically licensed after residency; and more likely to hold nonclinical roles in academia, clinical leadership, and the private sector than in nonprofits and government. We conclude that the importance of integrating physicians with policy training throughout various organizations warrants further research into the growth, characteristics, and career choices of these physicians.

Enrollment And Characteristics Of Dual-Eligible Medicare And Medicaid Beneficiaries In Integrated Care Programs.

Integrated care programs (ICPs) are meant to make Medicare and Medicaid coverage for dual-eligible beneficiaries work more seamlessly. Evidence is limited on ICP enrollment trends and the characteristics of dual-eligible beneficiaries who enroll in these programs-specifically, the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly, Medicare Advantage (MA) Fully Integrated Dual-Eligible Special Needs Plans, and state demonstration Medicare-Medicaid plans. Using national data, we evaluated changes in ICP enrollment between 2013 and 2020 and compared the demographic characteristics of beneficiaries in these programs relative to the characteristics of beneficiaries not in them. The proportion of dual-eligible beneficiaries in ICPs increased from 2.0 percent in 2013 to 9.4 percent in 2020. However, nonintegrated or partially integrated coordination-only MA plans experienced the plurality of growth in enrollment of dual-eligible beneficiaries. Relative to non-ICP fee-for-service Medicare, beneficiaries in ICPs were more likely to be Black and Hispanic versus White and were less likely to be rural, younger, or disabled. Policy makers should diligently monitor growth in ICPs and less integrated dual-eligible plans in MA while also evaluating their impact on equity, spending, and quality of care.

Designing a public access naloxone program for public transportation stations.

The opioid overdose epidemic has caused over 600,000 deaths in the U.S. since 1999. Public access naloxone programs show great potential as a strategy for reducing opioid overdose-related deaths. However, their implementation within public transit stations, often characterized as opioid overdose hotspots, has been limited, partly because of a lack of understanding in how to structure such programs. Here, we propose a comprehensive framework for implementing public access naloxone programs at public transit stations to curb opioid overdose-related deaths. The framework, tailored to local contexts, relies on coordination between local public health organizations to provide naloxone at public access points and bystander training, local academic institutions to oversee program evaluation, and public transit organizations to manage naloxone maintenance. We use the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts as a case study to demonstrate how it and other municipalities may implement such an initiative.

Health system-based housing navigation for patients experiencing homelessness: A new care coordination framework.

Patients experiencing homelessness are among the most disadvantaged in our society, suffering from poor health outcomes and exhibiting disproportionately high hospital utilization and spending. However, to date, hospitals have only scantily devoted time or resources to the housing coordination aspect of homelessness. Implementing better systems to coordinate housing for patients experiencing homelessness may improve health outcomes and reduce health care utilization for this population. This objective is now more important than ever as the economic impact of COVID-19 is expected to exacerbate the homelessness crisis. Ensuring that patients are properly connected to temporary or permanent housing is valuable to patient health, health care system metrics such as excess spending and utilization, and provider performance under Accountable Care Organizations or other risk-bearing payment models. Here, we propose a health systems-based housing coordination framework that may improve care delivery for patients experiencing homelessness. This framework relies on the coordination between dedicated hospital-based housing navigators who can identity patients experiencing homelessness and outpatient housing navigators equipped to coordinate short- and long-term housing specifically for patients experiencing homelessness who frequently interact with the health care system.

Charity Care Needs To Be Better Than This.

After a costly hospital stay, an uninsured patient's family rushes to navigate an unclear system of charity care.

Hospital at home: paying for what it's worth.

On November 25, 2020, CMS announced the creation of an Acute Hospital Care at Home program to reimburse qualifying hospital-at-home models. As we increasingly adopt the Acute Hospital Care at Home program and similar home-based services, it is crucial to better define the value of these programs and their appropriate reimbursement rates. We provide a framework centered around cost, quality, and equity to help accomplish this task. Quality reporting should use both inpatient-specific and home health care-specific metrics, equity-focused process metrics and risk-adjusted outcome metrics, and validated disease-specific tools. Costs should be measured comprehensively and uniformly through the use of time-driven activity-based costing and consider caregiver opportunity costs. It is also worthwhile to consider personal, societal, technical, and allocative value when determining the value and subsequent reimbursement rates of hospital-at-home programs. With careful patient selection, the hospital-at-home model has the potential to significantly benefit a subset of patients. To create sustainable reimbursement mechanisms for hospital-at-home programs, we first need a better definition of the value provided by this model of care.

The missing strategy in addressing language barriers.

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic is magnifying preexisting health disparities whereby patients with limited English proficiency receive lower-quality health care and experience poorer outcomes. To address these realities, language interventions to date have focused on interpreter services and linguistically tailored health information. But these limited solutions fail to target a more upstream, overlooked, and modifiable factor: a patient's access to improving their English proficiency and health literacy. We present recommendations for addressing language as a social determinant of health by improving access to English as a Second Language programs. This article outlines steps that health systems and policy makers can take to more directly treat upstream causes of language disparities.