Access to care is a complex topic that includes the study of whether sufficient health care resources exist to meet people’s needs, as well as whether people experience physical, financial or other barriers to those services. Evidence in this area can span from whether a rural community has enough specialists, like cardiologists, to whether people in an urban community have transportation or language barriers that make seeing health care providers more difficult.
In this blog post, Dr. Ayaz Hyder of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding explores how a community-based system dynamics (CBSD) approach enables facilitators to deeply understand and collaboratively address complex issues. This methodology fosters a more inclusive and insightful problem-solving environment by uniquely centering the community throughout the entire modeling process.
There has been an uptick in private equity firm investment in health care with recent attention being drawn to behavioral health services. Research on the impacts of commercialization of behavioral health is almost non-existent, leaving gaps in how this investment trend may affect access to care for communities of color.
In the third of a series of interviews with our Community Research for Health Equity grantees, AcademyHealth interviews Dennis Heaphy and Taline Alonso from Disability Policy Consortium to learn more about their project goals and findings during National Disability Employment Awareness Month.
AcademyHealth, with support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, awarded four grants to study and address diagnostic inequities and improve patient outcomes in behavioral health, cardiology, pediatrics, and oncology.
State-university partnerships create opportunities for early career researchers to engage in impactful, data-driven policy work that would be difficult to achieve through traditional academic paths alone.
The new Scholars will provide thought leadership on reproductive health issues within the health services research field and provide expert guidance to the recently launched Research Community on the Equity Impacts of Dobbs.
Reflecting on a networking session at the Annual Research Meeting, researchers studying the impacts of the Dobbs decision elevate challenges, successes, and opportunities to collaborate with others doing this work, such as through AcademyHealth’s new Research Community on the Equity Impacts of Dobbs.
More than twenty new projects will use access to timely, relevant data to inform policies ranging from treatment of chronic and complex conditions, payment for health services, reproductive health, access to care and treatment, and more.
Researchers from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai show that although Medicaid postpartum extensions represent a significant step forward in expanding access to maternal health care in the United States, these benefits remain inaccessible to millions of pregnant immigrants due to the complexities of state-specific pregnancy-related Medicaid policies.
Recent federal legislation and new research funding opportunities underscore the importance and urgency of improving representation in clinical trials to advance health equity.