Access to Care

AcademyHealth, in collaboration with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, hosted a meeting with clinical experts, researchers, patients and other stakeholders on possible causes of pre-hospital diagnostic delay. This meeting will inform a call for proposals to advance the evidence base for pre-hospital diagnostic delays related to cancer, sepsis, and acute cardiovascular conditions.

In the issue brief, AcademyHealth outlines current and potential areas for future research on pre-hospital diagnostic delay. Diagnostic delays in the clinical setting are well-researched, but there is little understood about delays occurring before a patient enters the health care setting, which leads to worse and inequitable health outcomes.

Three winners and three honorable mentions of AcademyHealth’s 2022 Health Equity DataJam leveraged publicly available datasets to answer pressing questions related to health and health care disparities.

AcademyHealth member Gilbert Gonzales highlights the impact of marriage equality for LGBTQ+ health and equity, as well as other health disparities that need to be addressed by the field.

Research nominated as the best abstract for each theme from the 2022 Call for Abstracts explores topics related to patient and consumer needs, Medicaid access and coverage, COVID-19, and more.

Previous evidence indicates that people exposed to police brutality are more likely to face mental health challenges like depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder, that Black people and people of color are more likely to experience police brutality, and, that these same populations are more likely to have unmet needs for mental health care. This plain language summary highlights new research from Alang et al. that connects these themes and demonstrates for the first time that exposure to police brutality is itself associated with unmet mental health needs.

In this commentary, researchers use syndemics to explain why Black men in the United States are dying disproportionately from COVID-19 and to guide a framework for efforts to mitigate their risk of dying from COVID-19.

It is medically, ethically, and legally imperative that measures aimed at protecting vulnerable patients are not undermined by the burdensomeness of exemption procedures, or by physicians’ political or personal views.