Stanford Health Policy

Proud of our own Loren Baker, who has been elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine for his contributions to better understanding of physician practice costs and health outcomes, medical technology adoption, the proliferation of out-of-network billing and gender disparities in physician income.

Our Rosenkranz Prize winner is hard at work on her research into why Bangladesh has one of the highest stillborn rates in the world. But Ashley Styczynski is also leading up this Stanford effort to help physicians and health-care workers in under-resourced countries protect themselves from COVID-19. During my trainings on infection control in Bangladeshi hospitals, I learned that many health-care workers were paralyzed by the fear of not knowing how to protect themselves against COVID-19 while caring for patients, especially during shortages of PPE, she said. I think this has substantially contributed to the large number of health-care workers becoming infected during the pandemic. In fact, Bangladesh has the highest rate of physician mortality from COVID of any country.

Health Policy PhD candidate Suhani Jalota founded and runs the Myna Mahila Foundation, a Mumbai-based women’s health and employment nonprofit. Its mission is to create the next generation of women leaders in urban slum communities. In India, a nationwide lockdown was announced in mid-March because of the pandemic. A lot of Myna Mahila’s regular activities had to be paused, but being based in the heart of the epidemic in some of Mumbai’s densest slums, we had a responsibility ...to provide relief to families there. "It’s very challenging for the government and most external organizations to support vulnerable populations in the slums, since diseases spread quickly in these hotspots," Jalota says in this article for the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she is also pursing an MBA. "And now that they’re sealed off, with no travel allowed to or from them, it’s become very difficult to gain access."

Michelle Mello writes in this JAMA Network viewpoint that the harassment of public health officials for proposing or taking steps to protect communities from COVID-19 is extraordinary in its scope and nature, use of social media, and danger to the ongoing pandemic response.

The coronavirus has caused a significant health crisis in California's prisons. As of this writing, there are about 99,000 people incarcerated in the state, and more than 8,300 of them have tested positive for the virus causing COVID-19. To stem the spread, Gov. Gavin Newsom has released more than 15,500 prisoners since mid-March many of them low-level offenders near the end of their sentence. More inmates who are either scheduled to be freed soon or have significant health... risks are eligible for release by the end of August. Researchers Jeremy Goldhaber-FiebertOpens in a new window, PhD, and Jason AndrewsOpens in a new window, MD, are leading a Stanford Medicine team focused on assessing the crisis inside California's corrections facilities and evaluating strategies to contain the virus. The effort has funding from the Horowitz Family Foundation. Goldhaber-Fiebert is a decision scientist and mathematical modeler, and Andrews is an infectious disease modeler and clinician.

The California COVID Assessment Tool, or CalCAT, contains assessments of the spread of COVID-19 in short-term forecasts of disease trends, and presents scenarios of the course of the disease across the 21 counties that represent 95% of the cumulative cases in the Golden State.

Stanford Medicine Dean Lloyd Minor: "Despite all the progress we have achieved in medicine and all the knowledge accumulated, a single virus has upended our world."

To commemorate Juneteenth, an oldie but goodie.

A $1 million gift from the Horowitz Family Foundation allows Stanford researchers to work on reducing the spread of COVID-19 among the incarcerated and inform mitigation strategies in other high-density living situations. The project is headed up by SHP's Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert and David Studdert, with their colleague Jason Andrews, an associate professor at the SoM. Incarcerated people are a particularly vulnerable group: they reside in close proximity, making disease control measures that are being used in the general population difficult or impossible, says Goldhaber-Fiebert.

Jason Wang in the news again about how Taiwan has slayed the pandemic.

While studying antimicrobial resistance in newborns in hospitals in Bangladesh, Stanford postdoctoral student Ashley Styczynski, MD, learned that the country has an alarming number of stillbirths, putting it in the top 10 countries in the world with the most cases. The discovery set her on a quest to discover the underlying reasons for the high incidents of stillbirths and to find ways to prevent it. As this year's winner of the Rosenkranz Prize, Styczynski looks forward to continuing her research in the country where she began work as a 2019-2020 Fogart Fellow almost 10 months ago.

SHP's Michelle Mello and Jason Wang tackle the thorny issue of your privacy when digital contact tracing picks up in the United States. Some distrust the government to protect our private health data, while others argue it’s unethical not to use all available data to end the pandemic.

By day, they are on the front lines of patient careperforming surgery, delivering babies, and providing care for some of the sickest patients at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford. But outside of the hospital, they are Midnight Roundsthe unofficial cover band of Stanford Children’s Health. Band members include Matias Bruzoni, MD; Yasser El-Sayed, MD; Raji Koppolu, NP; Jon Palma, MD; James Wall, MD; and David Scheibner.

Stanford Health Policy masters student and Knight-Hennessy scholar Eli Cahan writes that as more people fall sick from COVID-19, the number of caregivers will rise. They will by default assume responsibility for low-acuity cases below the threshold for hospital care, especially as hospital capacity becomes overwhelmed. So what steps should we take to protect them?