By Austin Frakt Social determinants of health comes up from time to time in health policy news or as the subject of reports from health policy-focused organizations. Here are quotes from four stories or reports that caught my eye recently. 1. Investing in Interventions That Address Non-Medical, Health-Related Social Needs, The National Academies Press, August 2019. Continue reading [...]

By Maureen Luba, African Region Advocacy Advisor for AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC), Malawi and 2019 Jane Jie Sun Women in Global Health LEAD Fellow, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Malawi was listed as one of the six locations that have made remarkable progress towards ending the AIDS epidemic in a recent product produced Continue reading [...]

By Austin Frakt The Drivers of Health meeting in Detroit on September 11 focused on the research and research gaps in the connection between health and housing (presented by Roshanak Mehdipanah of the University of Michigan) and education (presented by Adriana Lleras-Muney of UCLA). The meeting wrapped up with a panel discussion including those two scholars and Robert Gordon, Director Continue reading [...]

By Prosper Okonkwo, Research Associate in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health HIV diagnosis in Sub Saharan Africa in the nineties and early 2000s was literally a death sentence. In this post, Dr. Prosper Okonkwo looks at how treatment for HIV/AIDS in Nigeria has changed since the Continue reading [...]

By Kate Raphael In one of his recent Health Care Triage videos, Aaron Carroll calls attention to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association that supposedly tells us something new about plant-based diets and health. In this study, cardiovascular and all-cause mortality were the primary outcomes measured, and the authors found that Continue reading [...]

By Austin Frakt As I read more of the social determinants of health-related literature, I’m noticing a frequent theme: we don’t have enough information to guide decision making. For example, Kali Thomas and colleagues interviewed representatives from 17 Medicare Advantage plans (collectively capturing 65 percent of the Medicare Advantage market) about the importance of addressing social determinants Continue reading [...]