2024 Schedule

Health systems are joining hands, swallowing up competitors, acquiring new practices, and growing bigger. Like it or fear it, a tidal wave of consolidation is rocking healthcare, with uncertain impact on access, quality, and pricing. Perhaps mergers and acquisitions will allow providers to operate more efficiently so they can maintain clinical services in rural and other underserved locations. Or...

Laura Kelly sits down to discuss health policy and practice in the state of Kansas. Kelly, a Democrat, heads the traditionally red state of Kansas, where government is divided. She'll discuss challenges—from fiscal pressures, Medicaid cost-sharing, and the need to bolster public health, to the threat of future pandemics and delicate decisions about reproductive health and gender-affirming care. In...

At the edge of innovation, government initiatives like the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) are pursuing moonshots, venture capitalists are looking for impact and profits in the health space, and dedicated researchers are confronting diseases such as cancer in novel ways. All are eager to accelerate high-value, scalable breakthroughs that fill treatment gaps and could finally...

Mental health professionals consider sociopathy to be a personality disorder characterized by generalized apathy and difficulty internalizing and/or connecting to the learned social emotions. In her new book Sociopath: A Memoir, Patric Gagne freely admits the diagnosis applies to her, and attempts to help readers understand what it's like living with the complex personality type. Sociopathy is “an...

Although most Americans (83%) still trust their doctors to tell them the truth about health issues, fewer than half have faith in healthcare CEOs, government leaders, or journalists. As trust declines, people are turning to less reliable sources of medical information. The result: 40% of those surveyed say they regret a health decision they made based on misinformation. Sharing evidence in ways th...

The Broadway musical “How to Dance in Ohio” is the true story of a group of young people with autism preparing for a formal dance. Based on a documentary of the same name, the autistic characters are played by autistic actors in a musical celebration of neurodiversity and the universal need for connection. “If you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person,” says one actor, suggest...

Extreme heat waves, storms, and wildfires; disease outbreaks, water shortages, and crop loss; tick-borne illnesses and asthma—these are just some visible signs of a changing climate. Few physicians have been trained to recognize the potent health consequences—allergies that are no longer just seasonal, athletes suddenly finding it hard to breathe, patients who can’t get needed care when travel bec...

The mission of healthcare is to meet the needs of individual patients while public health is driven by a commitment to the health of broad populations. For too long, the two fields have operated largely in parallel, with only weak ties to connect them. Although the COVID-19 pandemic illustrated the urgency of building bridges, we are now at risk of pandemic amnesia. It is time to meet the country’...

The power of the judiciary to influence health made recent headlines when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and Alabama’s top court ruled that embryos created through in vitro fertilization should be considered children. Upcoming state and federal cases related to health could further alter the landscape for abortion, and reshape the nation’s approach to gun rights, transgender care, envi...

AI is transforming health, with implications for early disease detection, diagnostic accuracy, medical decision making, precision surgery, and personalized treatments. By speeding data collection and analysis, it can accelerate research, refine drug development, identify disease outbreaks, and enhance remote patient monitoring. But efficiency is not a substitute for empathy, and AI cannot replicat...

The communities we call home and the ways we live greatly influence health and longevity. By studying “Blue Zones” around the globe, Dan Buettner has uncovered the macro-level secrets that lead long and vigorous lives. At the individual level, Dean Ornish presents new evidence that lifestyle choices can alter the course of Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, cancer, and chronic illnesses. With the...

John Fetterman was campaigning for the US Senate when he suffered a near-fatal stroke. Fortunate that a visiting physician was on duty in a nearby rural hospital, Fetterman survived and went on to win the general election. A few weeks after being sworn in, his longstanding struggle with depression intensified and he entered an inpatient mental health facility. He has translated his personal experi...

The 3M’s—Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Affordable Care Act Marketplaces—cover more than 160 million people across the country, nearly one in two Americans. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) negotiates drug prices in line with Congressional mandates, issues Medicaid eligibility guidelines, provides guardrails for prescription drug benefit...

Climate change, with its global threats to health, could destroy low-lying nations and push as many as 135 million people into poverty by 2030, according to the World Bank. But these catastrophic consequences are not inevitable. Acknowledging that the burdens of climate change have been distributed inequitably, and targeting aggressive action specifically to vulnerable populations, could mitigate...

Managing disease is getting personal. With the genomic revolution upon us, we now understand that many diseases don't always follow the same predictable course and personalized treatments often work best. The recognition that disease patterns are greatly influenced by individual genetic makeup, combined with advances in technology and gene therapy, are driving a paradigm shift in medicine. Genomic...

Contemporary American society is deeply age segregated. Youth spend most of their time in school or with peers and older people head to senior centers and retirement communities. Yet a yearning for connections is palpable across the age spectrum and innovators are responding with models that bring the generations together in their homes, schools, workplaces, and communities. Success stories includ...

There is clear evidence that broader, more equitable access to primary care generates better health outcomes. But the traditional paradigm—seeing a family doctor in the office—is shifting in tandem with changing technology, new attitudes among young people, and physician shortages. Digital portals and other telehealth tools, walk-in clinics, and community-based facilities attuned to social determi...

From in vitro fertilization (IVF), which combines human eggs and sperm outside the body, to in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), which uses stem cells to create gametes, pregnancy is becoming possible in remarkable new ways. As innovative fertility treatments evolve, so do the surrounding ethical and legal questions. Some businesses now pay for IVF treatments, positioning coverage as a key recruitment to...

The health benefits of a nutritious diet are well-established, but just telling people to eat more plant-based foods and less unhealthy fat isn’t enough to reduce the toll of chronic diseases. A growing body of research supports a much more systematic approach, woven into the fabric of healthcare, to leverage the medicinal power of food. Medically tailored meals designed to address specific diagno...

Human beings sometimes forget they are animals themselves. The biological and emotional patterns of other mammals—seen in cancer among golden retrievers, high blood pressure in pregnant giraffes, the social behavior of insects, and connections among elephants that safeguard against loneliness—have much to teach us about our own health. The emerging field of zoobiquity, which joins evolutionary bio...