2023 Schedule

Medicare covers 65 million people, pays out $829 billion in annual benefits, and accounts for 21% of total national health spending. An aging population, increasing costs, and coverage expansions all raise questions about the long-term financing of this hugely popular national insurance program. The availability of sophisticated home-based medical interventions, a new law lowering the price of ins...

Twenty years ago, under the administration of George W. Bush, the US government established the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). With allocations exceeding $110 billion, it represents the largest investment ever made by any nation in a single disease. The resulting package of testing, prevention, and treatment is credited with saving more than 25 million lives. Learn how PEPFAR...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Atlantic lambasted the US Food and Drug Administration for moving too slowly to approve vaccines with the provocative headline “The Death Toll of Delay.” Not long before, National Public Radio had run a piece titled “One-Third of New Drugs Had Safety Problems After FDA Approval.” As the agency tries to move safe and effective drugs as quickly as possible to patien...

Declining cancer death rates, promising research, and innovative technology suggest the tide may be turning in the long war against cancer. Clinical trials using CRISPR technology to modify immune system cells are increasing, cancer vaccines are the next frontier for immunotherapy, and blood tests capable of detecting early signals of multiple types of cancer appear promising. Optimism is percolat...

Although essential to ensure the safety and effectiveness of new drugs and devices, clinical trials tend to be costly and slow to reach conclusions, and there is often an imbalance in the race, gender, and age of participants. Efforts to reinvigorate the research ecosystem aim to broaden access to trials, increase their diversity, and make it more efficient to capture protected patient health dat...

Sleep, perchance to dream—and to awaken restored, energetic, and prepared to meet the challenges of the day. The evolutionary gift of sleep lowers the risk of chronic disease, and supports brain health, immune function, and emotional regulation. Yet one in three adults say they don’t get enough sleep and as many as 70 million Americans suffer from insomnia, narcolepsy, sleep apnea, or another slee...

Today’s kids are facing a mental health crisis unlike any before them, with rates of severe loneliness, anxiety, and depressive episodes reaching new heights. It’s an urgent concern with far-reaching impacts, especially for those in historically marginalized communities who too often do not have access to the help they need. How can organizations leverage their scale to make sure every child can a...

When we vote, speak out at local meetings, volunteer to build a park, advocate for a cause, or create opportunities to connect with others, we take on the shared responsibility of nurturing our collective well-being. Civic engagement allows us to participate in the life of our communities, have our voices heard, and share power over the decisions that affect our lives. Inclusiveness is the watchwo...

Vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell are the five human senses most of us are fortunate enough to know intimately. We like to say that intuition is our sixth sense, but Emma Young, an award-winning journalist who writes extensively about science and health, delves into research that has uncovered many others. In Super Senses: The Science of Your 32 Senses and How to Use Them, she explains the...

Advances in health and medicine no longer rest entirely in the hands of scientists and clinicians. Patients and citizen activists are stepping up to influence research priorities, crowd-source data, and scour arcane medical literature in search of novel experimental approaches. Often, they are motivated by personal experiences, the refusal to accept that a disease lacks treatment or a cure, and th...

For many women reaching middle age, menopause is a liberating signal that the childbearing years have come to an end. But with its characteristic hot flashes and complex effects on memory, sleep, sexual functioning, bones, and mental health, this inevitable part of aging is also marked by physical and emotional challenges. Misinformation, research gaps, cultural myths, and sexism further complicat...

A healthcare worker shortage is today’s reality, putting safe, quality healthcare at risk for everyone. According to the US Surgeon General's Advisory on Building a Thriving Health Workforce, the realities are that many of our health workplaces and practices are exhausting and demoralizing for our talented, caring, and overworked healthcare professionals. The emotional, physical, and psychological...

Human-centered architecture puts user needs at the center of the buildings in which people work, play, learn, and heal, recognizing that design decisions play a potent role in mental and physical wellbeing. In clinical settings, health-promoting spaces are easy for patients and visitors to navigate, let in natural light, minimize intrusive noise, and foster respect for human dignity. More broadly,...

Research that can generate transformative, high-impact biomedical and health breakthroughs, from the molecular to the societal, is gaining traction as the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) gets off the ground. Launched by federal legislation in March 2022, ARPA-H will make pivotal investments to stimulate dynamic health solutions that can reshape millions of people’s lives. In...

Whether it is wind, birdsong, thunder, or the gently lapping ocean, the music of the natural world is a primal force that can awe, inspire, influence our moods, and improve our health. Many of the world’s greatest composers, from Beethoven and Mahler to Vivaldi and Rachmaninoff, took their inspiration from nature and recreated it to bring us closer to the seas, mountains, forests, and galaxies in...

The notoriously opaque healthcare landscape has been difficult for anyone to navigate. Patients need ways to find culturally sensitive providers, make wise medical decisions, understand their bills, and find communities of consumers facing similar health challenges. Health systems, employers, and insurers are looking for opportunities to personalize quality services, including in the area of behav...

Will AI bring in robot doctors? Chat GPT: “Yes, these robots can assist in various healthcare tasks, such as diagnosing illnesses, performing surgeries, or providing personalized care to patients.” How will AI be regulated? Chat GPT: “Regulatory approaches may vary between countries, but the overarching goal is to strike a balance between fostering innovation and safeguarding patient welfare.” Is...

When it comes to biomedical research, Earth’s gravity can be an obstacle, making it harder to program stem cells into viable organs, obscuring the crystalline structure of proteins, and interfering with cellular communication channels. The possibility of using space to advance science is no longer an exercise in imagination as biotech start-ups begin sending experiments into orbit. The costs are h...

One of the most pressing conversations in mental healthcare right now is the negative impact that technology — including screen time and social media — may have on our minds. But technology also provides an unprecedented opportunity to expand access to high-quality, effective, and personalized mental healthcare. Digital tools can help people proactively make positive lifestyle changes to care for...

Guided opportunities to look at art, and then talk about it, allow us to express and process emotions and cultivate wellbeing. HHart of Medicine, a program of H+H, New York City’s massive public health system, uses art to help clinical and non-clinical teams become more comfortable with one another, increase awareness of patient and caregiver experiences, and strengthen their powers of observation...