Health Systems Archives - Harvard Global Health Institute

FEATURED STORY | blog,Pandemics

HGHI, HU CFAR Host Virtual Grand Rounds on Lessons from HIV for Global Equity During Pandemics

Ongoing global Covid-19 vaccine and therapeutic inequities threaten to prolong and exacerbate the pandemic for all countries. As advocates, academics, and policymakers alike call for the U.S. and other wealthy nations to share these lifesaving resources with the world, it is prudent to consider the lessons learned from the HIV pandemic that can be translated

Call for Abstracts: Special Issue International Comparisons of High-Need, High-Cost Patients

Health Services Research (HSR) and the International Collaborative on Costs, Outcomes and Needs In Care (ICCONIC) are partnering to publish a Special Issue on International Comparisons of High-Need, High-Cost Patients: New Directions in Research and Policy. [...]

SDOH Roundup: Racism as a Driver of Health

By Kate Raphael We’ve talked about racism as a driver of health in previous posts; indeed, the toll of racism on BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) bodies has gained increasing national attention in recent weeks, especially in light of the coronavirus, which exacts disproportionate economic and health tolls on racial minorities and immigrants, and police [...]

The Economic Costs of COVID-19

By Kate Raphael The measures taken in the United States in an effort to slow the spread of coronavirus have dire economic consequences, the worst the country has seen since the Great Depression. Unemployment has skyrocketed, and many Americans find themselves unable to provide for their basic needs. However, this hardship has affected the U.S. [...]

“Addressing Social Determinants of Health: Time for a Polysocial Risk Score”

By Kate Raphael What determines health? That question drives all our work, and while we’ve observed a lot of progress in untangling the many answers to that question, we have very few tools for measuring different health effects. In a recent JAMA Viewpoint, authors Jose Figueroa, Austin Frakt, and Ashish Jha have proposed an approach to [...]

Social determinants, racism, and COVID-19

By Austin Frakt At an April 11 press conference, Surgeon General Jerome Adams acknowledged that people of color are disproportionately affected by COVID-19. For example, African Americans comprise 25% of the population of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin but nearly half of confirmed cases and three-quarters of the deaths. Latinos represent one-third of the population of New York [...]

Integrating Social Services & Health

Co-authored by Austin Frakt and Kate Raphael The most recent issue of Health Affairs focuses on “Integrating Social Services & Health,” and many of the articles highlight the ways in which social policy is linked to health outcomes. Here are a few that stood out to us. Linking Health And Social Services Through Area Agencies On Aging [...]

Drivers of Health and the Coronavirus

This post, by Austin Frakt, originally appeared on The Incidental Economist on April 2, 2020. I don’t have time for a fully formed post or column on this, but I want to make note of a few ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic is intersecting with drivers of health (which include social determinants and health system factors). [...]

“Social Policy is Health Policy”: A Review of the Evidence

By Kate Raphael We understand that social policies have great potential to affect health, but studies that aim to document the associations between policy interventions and health outcomes are often methodologically weak. Association studies are unable to identify the directionality of causal pathways (e.g., do chronically ill people make less money because they are able to [...]