The Haitian Cholera Outbreak and its Implications on Global Health Equity: A Conversation with Dr. Louise Ivers

HHPR Senior Editor Beier Nelson interviewed Dr. Louise Ivers, MD, MPH. She is the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute as well as the director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Global Health. Dr. Ivers has spent much of her work in Haiti, initially improving HIV treatment access, and in the last decade supporting the medical response to the cholera outbreak in the nation after the 2010 earthquake. 

Read More
A Framework to Address Maternal and Child Health Inequities as a Place-Based Issue

Maternal and child health inequities are a key indicator for community health and wellbeing. Black communities are especially burdened with unjust maternal and infant mortality. These outcomes are upheld by place-based factors known as the social and structural determinants of health, including structural racism. While attention to inequitable MCH outcomes has grown, the authors argue that MCH should be addressed as a place-based issue.

Read More
HHPRComment
Everything is Bigger in Texas: The Tale of $54,000 COVID Tests

On paper, the nature of the freestandng ER (FSER), a concept dating back to the 70s, represents a solution to the problem of poor access to urgent care—the proliferation of FSERs ideally leads to a healthy competitive market that ultimately drives down urgent care costs, fosters care improvement, and incentivizes physicians and stakeholders to expand urgent care access to neighborhoods, rural towns, and retail areas. This has, however, has not been the case, and perhaps most strikingly during the COVID-19 pandemic, where FSERs, most prominently in the state of Texas, have engaged in the practice of pandemic gouging.5 Though not much discourse or new data exist on the financial dynamics and operations of FSERs, examining their existence, along with the context of poor health literacy, poor regulation, for-profit healthcare they exist in, sheds light on the extreme manifestations of a fee-for-service system, and it is a telling example of a policy that is promising in theory but unsuitable in practice.

Read More
HHPRComment
Taking a Closer Look at Stem Cell Research: A Conversation with Francesca Mariani

HHPR Senior Editor Kimtee Kundu interviewed Francesca Mariani, Ph.D. Dr. Mariani is an Associate Professor at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC). She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and completed her Post-Doc at the University of California, San Francisco. Her expertise is in the area of stem cell biology, with particular focus on skeletal repair and regeneration.

Read More
HHPRComment
The Future of Gene Therapy in Health Care: A Conversation with Dr. Steven Pearson

HHPR Associate Editor Yewon Lee interviewed Steven D. Pearson, MD, MSc. Dr. Pearson is the founder and current President of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), an independent non-profit organization that conducts evidence-based reviews of health care interventions, such as drugs, devices and diagnostics, that help patients, doctors, and everyone else in the healthcare system know what works.

Read More
What the End of the Medicaid Continuous Coverage Requirement Means for Health Care Coverage and Access

Medicaid enrollment has grown significantly during the pandemic. This growth has primarily been driven by the continuous coverage requirement, a provision in pandemic relief legislation initially tied to the federally-declared public health emergency (PHE). States’ current enrollment procedures and capacity, as well as differences in expected approaches to completing redeterminations, will have significant implications for coverage and access outcomes.

Read More
Calling In the American Health Care System for Reproductive Justice: A Conversation with Loretta Ross

HHPR Senior Editor Jessie Liu interviewed professor and activist Loretta J. Ross about her personal journey with the reproductive justice movement and how changes to the American health care system can be part of the path forward.

Read More
Combatting Maternal Mortality through Trustworthiness and Advocacy: A Conversation with Dr. Neel Shah

What we need to do is realize that everybody has an important role to play in addressing maternal mortality, but they've got to do it with an awareness of their positionality. Academia has a role, government has a role, and the private sector has a role. It’s okay for people to take different strategies and tactics, and even to some extent have different goals. But what we need is a shared framework and vision for what a better world looks like, and a shared set of values.

Read More