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October 31, 2007
Suicide and Veterans
From HealthDay via USNews.com:
Dividing veterans into three groups by age -- 18 to 44 years, 45 to 64 years, and 65 or over -- [lead researcher Kara Zivin's] team found that the youngest group was at higher risk of suicide. Veterans aged 18 to 44 committed suicide at a rate of about 95 suicides per every 100,00 person years, versus about 78 per 100,000 person years in the group aged 45 to 64, and 90 per 100,000 for those 65 or older.
That findings are at odds with suicide trends among the general population, where younger depressed people are typically at lower risk than older individuals, the researchers said.
The full study can be found at the American Journal of Public Health.
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Posted by: David Porter on October 31, 2007
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Category: Health Disparities
October 30, 2007
Health Disparities in Nephrology
Center Director Ashwini Sehgal, MD and Andrew O'Connor, DO will moderate "Health Disparities in Nephrology" at the American Society of Nephrology meeting in San Francisco this weekend.
From the ASN's website:
Health disparities are differences in health-related outcomes by race, gender, socioeconomic status, or other relevant subgroups. Striking disparities occur in the onset and progression of CKD, in many dialysis-related outcomes, and in access to kidney transplantation. This symposium will describe disparities relevant to nephrology, discuss the mechanisms for the disparities, and review interventions to reduce or eliminate disparities.
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Posted by: David Porter on October 30, 2007
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Category: About Us
October 29, 2007
Lay Patient Navigators and Disparities
From Newswise:
"Our study shows that LPNs can play an important role in reducing the healthcare disparities among minority and low-income patients by being their patient advocates,” said David Khan, M.D., lead author of the study and a radiation oncologist at Centinela Freeman Medical Center in Inglewood, Calif. “These patient navigator programs should become an essential part of our healthcare delivery system to provide these patients with better access to quality care.”
The abstract for the presentation can be viewed at the International Journal of Radiation Oncology.
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Posted by: David Porter on October 29, 2007
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Category: Health Disparities
October 26, 2007
Poor hit hard by diabetes
From the current issue of JAMA:
Persons living in low-income communities in the United States are 80% more likely to be hospitalized for diabetes or related complications compared with those living in affluent areas, according to data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
The pdf of the original report can be found at the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project.
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Posted by: David Porter on October 26, 2007
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Category: Health Disparities
October 22, 2007
Elderly not receiving proper amount of care
First we learned that children were getting less care than adults. Now it seems the elderly are also receiving less than optimal care.
From HealthDay:
The study found that vulnerable elderly patients -- those at risk of death or functional decline -- received only 65 percent of tests and other diagnostic evaluations and treatments recommended for a number of illnesses and conditions, including diabetes and heart disease.
"Thirty-five percent of the medical care interventions they should have received were not provided, indicating significant room for improvement. We'd much rather have everything higher -- say, at least 90 percent," lead author Dr. David S. Zingmond, assistant professor of general internal medicine and health services research at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, said in a prepared statement.
The original study can be found in the journal Medical Care.
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Posted by: David Porter on October 22, 2007
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Category: Health Disparities
October 16, 2007
Level of insurance linked to having a burst appendix
From NYTimes.com:
The scientists, writing last month in The Journal of the American College of Surgeons, used state data from 2003 and 2004 in New York and included 26,637 appendicitis patients, of whom 7,969 had a ruptured appendix. There were no significant differences in the likelihood of perforation among whites, African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians.
But the kind of insurance — or lack of it — had a significant effect. Compared with patients who had private insurance coverage, those on Medicare were 14 percent more likely to have a burst appendix, people on Medicaid were 22 percent more likely, and those with no insurance at all were 18 percent more likely to have a rupture. The differences persisted even after controlling for age, sex, socioeconomic status, type of hospital and other factors.
Original study can be found at the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.
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Posted by: David Porter on October 16, 2007
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Category: Health Disparities
October 15, 2007
Disparities in health literacy
A recently completed report talks about how poor health literacy costs the health care system billions.
From theday.com:
“Health-literacy has nothing to do with reading or literacy,” [John Vernon, PhD] said. “It is more difficult to read medical literature (that is) specifically health-related.”
Though ethnic minority groups have a larger percentage of people with low health-literacy, more than 59 million white Americans have a basic or below basic understanding of the health system.
The study suggests that despite the high numbers of people who do not understand health care, 75 percent of the health-illiterate are insured.
If left uncorrected, ignorance of the health care system could cost as much as $1.6 trillion to $3.6 trillion over the next 30 to 50 years, according to the study, which was subsidized by Pfizer Inc.
Original press release at the University of Connecticut School of Business.
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Posted by: David Porter on October 15, 2007
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Category: Health Disparities
October 11, 2007
Children receive less care than adults
From Healthday:
"Children in the U.S. receive only 46 percent of the care that they should be getting, so they receive worse care than adults in this country, who get 55 percent of needed care," said study author Dr. Rita Mangione-Smith, a researcher at Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle.
The original study appears in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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Posted by: David Porter on October 11, 2007
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Category: Health Disparities
October 09, 2007
Personal Health Records and Disparities
Microsoft made some news last week with the announcement of their HealthVault system.
From Medpagetoday.com:
Information such as blood pressure or weight loss can be uploaded and -- once online -- can be shared with doctors or any other recipients a user chooses, the company said.
The goal is to reduce "unnecessary confusion, paperwork and delays," Microsoft said.
"The launch of HealthVault makes it possible for people to collect their private health information on their terms and for companies across the health industry to deliver compatible tools and services built on the HealthVault platform," Microsoft said in a statement.
Microsoft is not alone in the push towards Personal Health Records (PHRs.)
From NYTimes.com:
[Google] has been developing offerings broadly similar to Microsoft’s — personal health records stored in Google data centers, and enhanced health search.
Google will not discuss the timing of its health plans. Marissa Mayer, the Google vice president now overseeing the health team, said, “We hope the products we’re working on will give people access to better information about health that is more relevant to them and help them manage and control their own information.”
At Cisco, the head of its health care practice, Dr. Jeffrey Rideout, recently left to join a private equity firm, Ziegler HealthVest Management. (Cisco called his departure a “leave of absence.”) And Dossia, a coalition led by Intel to provide employees at several large companies with personal health records, is going more slowly than planned.
The security of the data seems to be one of the major concerns.
From the PointClear Blog:
Microsoft may do a great job securing the HealthVault platform, but what about all the third-party vendors and partners who write applications that use HealthVault? If health information sloshes back and forth between these third parties, and some of the third parties have insufficient security which can potentially lead to data breaches, then how secure is HealthVault in practice?
Aside from the security issues, there may be access issues for underserved populations.
A policy brief from Mathematica Policy Reasearch, Inc (pdf) reviewed 21 software-based PHRs and found that only 2 products were available in Spanish as well as English and all but 2 of the reviewed software packages charges a fee for the PHR. While this fee can be avoided in free web based offerrings such as the those by Microsoft and Google, an individual still needs secure access to a computer.
For insightful discussion read this post at the Health Care Blog.
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Posted by: David Porter on October 09, 2007
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Category: Health Care
October 05, 2007
Improving Access to Kidney Transplants
The Center for Reducing Health Disparities was recently awarded $6 million to study access to kidney transplants as well as hypertension in Cleveland's minority community.
From today's Plain Dealer:
Dr. Ashwini Sehgal, a MetroHealth Medical Center physician and a co-medical director for the Cleveland Department of Public Health, will lead the project. A cornerstone of the research will be locating and training kidney transplant recipients to act as ambassadors for kidney failure patients.
"Right now, to get a transplant you have to be interested, medically suitable, go to a transplant center, get on a waiting list and then move up the list," said Sehgal.
"Barriers to poor people and minorities exist at several of those steps."
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Posted by: David Porter on October 05, 2007
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Category: About Us; Health Disparities
October 04, 2007
Health Disparities and Maternal Health
From womensenews.org:
Researchers at the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found college-educated black women twice as likely as other women to deliver premature or underweight babies. Scientists found subjects' birth outcomes resembled those of unemployed, uninsured white women with low education levels.
These are among the findings of five landmark reports released today by the Washington-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies that draw together existing data in a comprehensive review that calls for an end to the inequities.
The center concludes that African American babies--who are twice as likely as white infants to die before their first birthday--will have a better shot at life if the health inequities plaguing black mothers, such as less prenatal care and adequate nutrition, are corrected.
The original studies can be found at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
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Posted by: David Porter on October 04, 2007
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Category: Health Disparities
October 03, 2007
Gender Disparities in Heart Trauma Treatment
ABCNews.com reporting on a new JAMA study:
Women are much less likely than men to receive a range of care for heart problems at the hospital, even when they arrive while having a heart attack, according to a new study of Medicare patients.
"It is a well documented trend in health care that is not changing," said Dr. Sharonne Hayes at the Mayo Clinic. "Women get less treatment, and they get it later, compared to men who have the same symptoms or conditions."
You can watch a video of this report here (Windows Media Player / Quicktime.)
The current issue of JAMA (subscription may be required) contains two studies on disparities in the treatment of cardiac patients.
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Posted by: David Porter on October 03, 2007
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Category: Health Disparities
October 02, 2007
Disparity in Vitamin Supplement Usage
From the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine:
In 1999-2002, 31.8% of children used dietary supplements, with the lowest use reported among infants younger than 1 year (11.9%) and teenagers 14 to 18 years old (25.7%) and highest use among 4- to 8-year-old children (48.5%). Use was highest among non-Hispanic white (38.1%) and Mexican American (22.4%) participants, lowest among non-Hispanic black participants (18.8%), and was not found to differ by sex.
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Posted by: David Porter on October 02, 2007
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Category: Health Disparities