AHRQ announced AcademyHealth member Dr. Robert Otto Valdez will be the new Director
Acting Director of Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) David Meyers announced that AcademyHealth member Dr. Robert Otto Valdez will be joining the agency as its new Director. Prior to joining AHRQ, Dr. Valdez served as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Professor Emeritus of Family & Community Medicine and Economics at the University of New Mexico. He was the Founding Executive Director of the RWJF Center for Health Policy at the University. He previously served as founding Dean at the Drexel University School of Public Health. From 1985 through 1999, he was Professor of Health Services at the UCLA School of Public Health and directed the health services doctoral studies program, the MBA/MPH program in collaboration with the UCLA Anderson School of Business and served as associate director of the Chicano Studies Research Center.
You can read AcademyHealth’s full statement here.
AcademyHealth’s Inaugural Public Policy Fellowship Application is now live
AcademyHealth is looking for a current or recent graduate student who wants hands-on experience in applying their health policy and health systems knowledge and research skills to federal advocacy. This paid fellowship can be completed remotely or in D.C. Learn more here. Applications of a resume and cover letter are due by March 15 and should be sent to Advocacy@AcademyHealth.org.
Share your thoughts to the NIH on its Strategic Plan for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) are asking for feedback on creating a framework for the NIH-wide Strategic Plan for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA). AcademyHealth intends to inform the NIH about the ideas of our membership.
The purpose of the Strategic Plan is to articulate NIH’s vision for embracing, integrating, and strengthening diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) across all NIH activities to achieve the NIH mission. NIH has identified three key areas that they want the new Strategic Plan to cover: Organizational practices to center and prioritize DEIA within the workforce; broad efforts to manage and sustain DEIA through structural and cultural change; and research to promote both workforce and health equity.
You can let us know what your suggestions are here.
Government shutdown averted as Congress continues to debate appropriations
The current fiscal year (FY22) began on October 1, but has been funded by a series of continuing resolutions (CRs) that have kept funding flat as Congress debates full year appropriations bills. Congress extended the current CR from February 18 to March 11 to provide time to continue negotiating the omnibus. Specific program negotiations have been delayed as congressional leaders have first had to agree on top-line numbers for defense and nondefense discretionary accounts, and then negotiate the allocations that each of the 12 subcommittee will receive from that deal. The subcommittee allocations are not publicly known at this point, and will not be revealed until the bills are released.
There are signs for optimism that Congress will complete the full-year bills, including continuing bipartisan and bicameral negotiations, subcommittees receiving initial spending limits to fill, and retiring senior appropriators from both parties that do not want to push off their priorities. Upcoming challenges include the status of so-called riders, or policies that get renewed year to year such as the Hyde Amendment, earmarked spending, as well as potential need for supplemental spending in response to the pandemic.
NIH announces new open data-sharing policy
NIH has announced a new open-data policy that will go into effect in January 2023 that will require all grant applications for projects that collect scientific data must include a ‘data management and sharing’ (DMS) plan that contains details about the software or tools needed to analyze the data, when and where the raw data will be published and any special considerations for accessing or distributing that data. This new policy will emphasize the importance of good data management and promote the expectation of maximizing the appropriate sharing of scientific data generated from NIH-funded or conducted research.
NCHS reports more than one million excess deaths due to the pandemic
The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) has announced that the United States has seen more than one million excess deaths since the start of the pandemic. Although the vast majority of the excess deaths are due to the virus, the CDC mortality records also expose swollen numbers of deaths from heart disease, hypertension, dementia and other ailments across two years of the pandemic. Additionally, the pandemic’s disruptions to routine checkups and screenings may lead to the health system facing additional strain as patients receive treatments later into their disease progression than they otherwise would. The effect on the medical system and federal budget will likely be felt for years to come.
House Authorizers continue to develop ARPA-H
The House Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing on how to design ARPA-H to support biomedical research. Subcommittee Chair Eshoo has announced that a key decision in the design of the Agency, where it will be located, has been agreed to amongst House negotiators as existing as a distinct unit within HHS, rather than as a new Institute in NIH. The authorization of the new agency is largely expected to occur within the larger vehicle of Cures 2.0.
Temporary OSTP leadership announced
Following the resignation of Dr. Eric Lander, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and top science advisor to President Biden after reports of bullying, the Biden Administration has announced new temporary leadership. Dr. Alondra Nelson, the current Deputy Director for Science and Society in the OSTP is the new Acting Director of OSTP. The president also announced that Dr. Francis Collins, who retired in December from his role as director of the National Institutes of Health, would serve as his top science adviser and co-chair of the president’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Califf confirmed to lead a battered FDA
Dr. Robert Califf, who briefly led the FDA in 2016, was confirmed by a razor-thin 50-to-46 vote for a second stint as commissioner, giving the embattled agency its first permanent head in more than a year. Both support and opposition for Califf was bipartisan, as objections to his nomination centered on his prior work with the pharmaceutical industry, his positions on opioids, and opposition from anti-abortion groups.
Adding to the challenges the FDA is facing is backlash from the agency reversing it’s indicated approval of a COVID-19 vaccine for children under five. The FDA had pressed Pfizer-BioNTech to seek authorization for this age group in January after positive results were seen for children 6 months to 2 years with two shots, but insufficient antibodies being produced for children 2 to 4 with the assumption that they would likely need three. Reportedly responding to new data from the Omicron wave, the FDA is expected to wait until at least April to potentially approve the vaccine.
House passed the America COMPETES Act
The House has passed the America COMPETES Act, a bill to increase funding of US science research. The bill is a response to the Senate bill, the US Innovation and Competition Act, which passed in June 2021. The COMPETES Act would slightly more than double the funding of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to about $18 billion, as well as provide $52 billion for domestic semiconductor manufacturing, research, and development. Currently, only about 28% of NSF grant applications receive funding. Both chambers will now negotiate a final bill.
What I’m Reading…
It is imperative that our field be able to disseminate the latest research on racism in the health care system if we are to meaningfully identify and eliminate health disparities. For this reason, I am dismayed to read that this month’s Health Affairs, which is devoted to the topic of racism and health, was unable to advertise on Google and Twitter because content involving racism is flagged as “sensitive content”. I hope whatever process led to this designation is remedied in a transparent and immediate manner.
The invisibility of patients with disabilities is tragically not new in our country. As our health system continues to grapple with and recover from the crush of the pandemic, it is critical that people with disabilities from COVID-19 are not ignored. I appreciated the article in Nature from Laura Spinney that discussed how pandemics disable people and that policymakers must not be complacent about the tens of millions of people with new disabilities from Long COVID.
Patients must be key stakeholders in the development, dissemination, and long-term support of biomedical innovations. The story reported in IEEE Spectrum of patients with retinal implants that are no longer supported as the manufacturer is on the verge of bankruptcy shows how individuals can fall through the gaps. As we create ever more complex implants and innovations, they must be designed with the idea that the patients may outlive the company.
The U.S. health care system is plagued by both overuse and underuse of health care, and may require novel interventions to find a high-value equilibrium. Baicker and Obermeyer reported in JAMA on how they used machine learning to identify if practitioners were overprescribing certain tests to patients with extremely low propensities for testing positively. They found while that about two-thirds of tests for acute coronary syndrome were going to patients with very low risk, making the tests low value, but they were undertesting predictably high-risk patients, leading to poor health outcomes.