Physician Heal Thyself?

The following appeared in The Washington Post Online.

As both a physician and ordained minister, I am often called upon to heal. Whether hearts or bodies, minds or souls, healing is central to both professions. Surprisingly, I heard my President echo the same thought and it struck a chord. He cautioned health-care providers not to see medicine as mere business, a practice model which is rife with hazard. Instead, he romanticized for some and made poignant for us all the call of medicine. Armed with a mix of ego and duty, he championed all stakeholders — specifically physicians — to own the problem so that we may move forward to create solutions.

Physicians take an oath. We are taught to first do no harm. Yet, the American system of health-care delivery is fraught with unchecked abuses and unsustainable damage has been suffered. In society, we aspire to live by the edict of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” However, the culture of American medicine is too fragmented, driven by excess, ignorance and complacency. Regrettably, these attitudes have cost efficiency and indulged appetites for pricier, quantitative medical care while sacrificing value. Our system hence is in dire need of more group-accountability, individual responsibility and focus on health promotion, wellness and quality.

Introducing Max Nathan Sale

Max Nathan Sale born June 18th around 2 pm. 8lbs 11oz a little over 20 inches.
Mom, baby…Chris, Darby and Emily are all doing superb

Glied nominated to Federal Post

From WhiteHouse.gov:

Sherry Glied, Nominee for Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, Department of Health and Human Services

Sherry Glied is Professor and Chair in the Department of Health Policy and Management of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She has extensive experience in health care financing and mental health policy research. From 1992-1993, she served as a Senior Economist for health care and labor market policy to the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, under President Bush and President Clinton. Professor Glied was a participant in President Clinton’s Health Care Task Force and headed working groups on global budgets and on the economic impacts of the health plan. Her book on health care reform, Chronic Condition, was published by Harvard University Press in January 1998. She also has substantial experience in mental health policy, particularly around issues of child and adolescent mental health policy and financing.  Professor Glied is a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Network on Mental Health Policy and is co-author of Better but Not Well: Mental Health Policy in the US Since 1950, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2006. 

Alumni Summit for Public Health Leadership: June 3rd

Click here for more information about the Alumni Summit for Public Health Leadership.

Thoughts from ISPOR conference (D. Frame EMPH ‘09)

Comparative effectiveness research was the big topic at this meeting of pharmacoeconomics and outcomes researchers (www.ispor.org). Speakers at a Tuesday plenary session included Hal Sox, Annals of Internal Medicine editor and chair of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) panel charged with prioritizing areas for the $1.1 billion comparative effectiveness research funding in the stimulus package.

In some sense people here feel that the “comparative effectiveness” moniker is just attaching another word to what many researchers have been doing all along – finding ways to see how well health care interventions work once they are translated to the “real world” of clinical practice. This is not to say the administration’s policies will not make a difference, however. This kind of research is often conducted using large observational databases rather than a priori controlled trials, so there is a perception that more gaming of the results is possible – payers can get the answers they want from their analysis, while pharmaceutical companies can get the answers they want from competing analysis, sometimes using the same data source.

The big difference that government involvement can make, then, is breaking the stalemate on comparative effectiveness research by requiring projects it funds to be truly transparent: prospective registration of plans for how the analysis will be conducted, for instance, and requirements to make findings publicly available regardless of the result. It remains to be seen what the exact parameters of these projects will be, and whether they will vary across the agencies involved (the funding is split between AHRQ, NIH, and HHS).

The IOM panel’s report on national priorities for research is due out June 30th.

New Blogs Added to the Blog Roll, Twitter Feed Added

Just wanted to let you know about a new addition to the Blog Roll* courtesy of Kate Garrett.  The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has created a blog to track health care reform.  They have also created a new Twitter account for the blog, which joins their existing Twitter account for the RWJ Commission Twitter.  (RWJ is on top of the tech trends, to say the least).  We also listed several new blogs on the blog roll including: The Health Affairs Blog, Health Care Law Blog, Health Care Policy and Communications Blog, Healthcare Economist, and the Wall Street Journal Health Blog.

So that you can follow the Twitter feed, or tweets, of the RWJ foundation, we have updated our site to include their Tweet Feed. It is located on the left hand side of the blog.

If you’d like to suggest a blog to the blog roll or a Twitter user we should follow, please respond below. (You must use your Columbia Uni, although it will not be published, we will use it to confirm that you are a EMPH Student.)

*Blog Roll: Is a list of blogs on a blog (usually placed in the sidebar of a blog, in our case located on the right, under the calendar) that reads as a list of recommendations by the blogger of other blogs)

Dr. Craig: AmeriCares expanding domestic programs

For the  past two years, Dr. Edward V. Craig (MSNBC.com contributor and EMPH Class of 2007) has served on the Board of Global Medical Advisers for AmeriCares, an organization that works to channel donated medical supplies and medicines both internationally and nationally. They want to expand the reach of AmeriCares  domestic work particularly to uninsured and underinsured Americans.  They asked that he share the document, “Keeping Americans Healthy” and so we are posting it here: Keeping_Americans_Healthy.

Dr. Craig hopes it can benefit the organizations of EMPH students and alumni.

For more information, please contact Caity Brown at cbrown@americares.org.

New Blogger

Just wanted to welcome a new blogger to the mix, Ali Attaie EMPH class of 2010. He join Kavita Kewalramani and I, both from the EMPH class of 2009. Ali’s first post was regarding the appointment of two Columbia Alumni to the Obama administration, and if you ask me, I don’t think we’ve seen the end of Obama appointments from members of the Columbia community…

But for now, welcome Ali!

Two Columbia Alumni to Federal Posts

New York City’s 41st Health Commissioner, Thomas R. Frieden, M.D., MPH, was appointed as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by President Barack Obama on Friday. Dr. Frieden is an alumnus of Columbia University’s College of Physicians & Surgeons (‘86) and Mailman School of Public Health (‘85). Dr. Frieden becomes the second high ranking health official with a connection to the Mailman School of Public Health and New York City to be appointed by the Obama administration. Dr.Margaret Hamburg,a former Assistant Professor of Clinical Public Health at Columbia (’91-97) and former New York City Health Commissioner was nominated by President Barack Obama earlier this week to be the head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Click here for the Frieden Announcement from Columbia University

Sherry Glied on Mental Illness in Health Affairs, MSNBC

Professor Sherry Glied has published the findings of a study in Health Affairs; MSNBC.com also reported on the report’s findings.  From Health Affairs:

Mental illness and its treatment are largely invisible. We use multiple publicly available data sources to evaluate changes in the well-being of Americans with mental illnesses over the past decade. We find that access to care, including specialty psychiatric and inpatient care, and financial protection have improved. However, not all people with mental health problems have shared in these improvements. Access to care among those with mental health impairments appears to have declined, and we estimate that because of continued increases in incarceration, at least 7 percent of the population with serious and persistent mental illnesses are incarcerated in jail or prison each year.

From MSNBC:

“What we generally find is there has been an increase in access to care for all populations,” said Sherry Glied of Columbia University in New York, whose study appears in the journal Health Affairs.

“Mental health has become much more a part of mainstream medical care,” Glied said in a telephone interview.

Clicking on the icon’s will link you to the respective sites.