October 21st & 28th, 2020
12:00pm – 1:00pm EST
Health and well-being are influenced by myriad relationships between individuals and socio-political factors including racism, education, and food security – or so called “social determinants of health.” Inequity within and among these determinants govern who has access to health protective resources – such as access to healthcare and quality housing. Amidst the global pandemic, where stark disparities abound, how do these forces shape health outcomes across diverse populations? And what are the implications for social and health care policy?
On October 21st and 28th from 12:00 – 1:00 PM EST, we hosted a two-part webinar series to answer these questions and get the latest findings from the experts who contributed to the 2020 open-access Health Services Research (HSR) Theme Issue on Drivers of Health. Authors shared key insights from their latest cutting-edge, peer-reviewed research and explore implications for social/health care system interventions that promote wellbeing. Key themes in the webinars included suicide and mental health; food insecurity and health care utilization; threat of eviction and preterm birth; tax credits and health; health insurance and health status; and community health worker interventions and hospitalization.
The HSR theme issue was sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) as part of the Drivers of Health project and was co-edited by Austin Frakt, PhD and David Nerenz, PhD. Patrick Romano, MD, MPH, FACP, FAAP, served as the Editor-in-Chief. The Drivers of Health project was created in May 2019 to make progress on the question of what affects health and to expand scientific evidence around social determinants of health.
October 21st
Farrokh Alemi, PhD
Professor of Informatics in the Department of Health Administration and Policy, George Mason University
Relative Accuracy of Social and Medical Determinants of Suicide in Electronic Health Records
Farrokh Alemi was trained as an operations researcher and industrial engineer and has worked in both academia and health industry. He maintains patents on (1) sentiment analysis, (2) measurement of episodes of illness and (3) personalized medicine. His research focuses on causal analysis of massive data available in electronic health records. Dr. Alemi is the author of the widely used Multi-Morbidity index. In addition, Dr. Alemi was a pioneer in online management of patients and has provided Congressional testimony on role of Internet in health delivery. He is the author of a book on decision analysis and another on policy systems and a third on application of process improvement to personal health.
Emma Boswell Dean, PhD
Assistant Professor at Miami Herbert Business School, University of Miami
Food Insecurity, Health Care Utilization, and Health Care Expenditures
Emma Boswell Dean, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Health Management and Policy at the Miami Herbert Business School at the University of Miami. She is a health economist whose research encompasses issues related to pharmaceutical policy and pricing, global health, and the organization of health care markets. She earned her Ph.D. in Managerial Science and Applied Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Aayush Khadka, MS
PhD candidate in Population Health Science, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health
In-utero exposure to threat of evictions and preterm birth: Evidence from the United States
Aayush is a PhD candidate in Population Health Sciences (Global Health and Population). His dissertation focuses on the social and environmental determinants of adverse birth outcomes and infant mortality in the United States. He has also worked on issues surrounding out of pocket expenditures, costs associated with non-communicable and communicable diseases, and family planning interventions. Aayush has a BA in Political Science and Mathematics from Williams College and a SM in Global Health and Population from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.
Margaret McConnell, PhD
Associate Professor of Global Health Economics in the Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard University
In-utero exposure to threat of evictions and preterm birth: Evidence from the United States
Margaret McConnell’s research applies tools from economics to answer questions about how to improve health outcomes for marginalized populations, with a particular focus on behavioral economic theory, experimental methods and impact evaluation strategies. She have been principal investigator or co-principal investigator on more than five randomized control trials within both low-income populations in the U.S. and within low income countries. Her research has consistently focused on deepening our understanding of the choices and preferences of women during the critical periods of pregnancy, postpartum and early childhood in order to better tailor interventions to these specific contexts and constraints. She enjoys broad collaboration with social scientists, physicians and health services researchers.
October 28th
Erin R. Morgan, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Epidemiology and Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center, University of Washington
State Earned Income Tax Credits and General Health Indicators: A Quasi-Experimental National Study 1993–2016
Dr. Erin R. Morgan is a T-32 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center who studies injury and self-directed violence among pediatric and young adult populations, with emphasis on suicide prevention and firearm safety. Her work builds on partnerships between academia and practice to use real, up-to-date and practical data to inform policy and interventions. She finished her PhD in epidemiology at the University of Washington this past August where she focused on risk of suicide and firearm suicide after incarceration in addition to the application of machine learning on textual data from medical examiner reports. During her upcoming fellowship, Dr. Morgan plans to continue building on her dissertation research by using natural language processing to explore emerging racial disparities in the changing rates of youth suicide.
Abigail R. Barker, PhD
Faculty Lead for Data and Methods, Center for Health Economics and Policy at the Institute for Public Health, Washington University in St. Louis
The Cumulative Impact of Health Insurance on Health Status
Abigail R. Barker, PhD is an Assistant Professor at the Brown School at Washington University, where she is also affiliated with the Center for Health Economics and Policy at the Institute for Public Health. She is a health economist whose recent research has focused on health insurance markets, combining large secondary datasets and exploiting geographic variation to understand the role of prices/premiums in influencing choice and access, with attention to rural health policy questions. She has contributed cost and econometric analyses to numerous public health related projects, and she analyzes Medicaid payment policies from the perspective of incentivizing upstream care to improve health outcomes while containing costs. Dr. Barker is currently serving as an economic consultant to the State of Missouri’s Medicaid program, MO HealthNET.
Linda Li, MPH
PhD Candidate, Social Policy and Policy Analysis, Columbia University
The Cumulative Impact of Health Insurance on Health Status
Linda Li, MPH was until recently a data analyst for the Center for Health Economics and Policy. Ms. Li worked on health policy and health services research questions, applying quantitative methods to secondary datasets and Medicaid claims data. She is currently a PhD student at Columbia University studying Social Policy and Policy Analysis.
Aditi Vasan, MD
Postdoctoral Fellow, National Clinician Scholars Program, University of Pennsylvania
Effects of a standardized community health worker intervention on hospitalization among disadvantaged patients with multiple chronic conditions: a pooled analysis of three clinical trials
Aditi Vasan is a General Pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a fellow in the National Clinician Scholars Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in the implementation and evaluation of interventions that address families’ unmet social needs and support them in connecting to government benefit programs and community resources.
John Morgan, MD
Postdoctoral Fellow, National Clinician Scholars Program, University of Pennsylvania
Effects of a standardized community health worker intervention on hospitalization among disadvantaged patients with multiple chronic conditions: a pooled analysis of three clinical trials
John Morgan is a fellow in the National Clinician Scholars Program and the current Chief Clinical Innovation Officer for Virginia Medicaid. He is interested in understanding behavioral, structural and social determinants of ambulatory care utilization in order to inform the design of delivery platforms that effectively align payer, provider, patient and public interests.