May 15th, 2012

Global AIDS relief program reduces mortality, research shows

The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief “may be considered the clearest demonstration of aid’s effectiveness in recent years,” according to Stanford researchers who analyze the program in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Read more »

May 8th, 2012

Stanford study shows no evidence that international health aid is wasted

The findings, published in PLoS Medicine, are poised to influence a debate among policymakers and donors over whether international assistance is wasted and displaced by governments that receive the money. Read more »

May 2nd, 2012

China provides universal health insurance at a fraction of the cost

Chinese officials are developing a social security network to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing demographic landscape. Karen Eggleston discusses the success of China’s health care reforms and the long road ahead. Read more »

April 16th, 2012

Treating men at high risk for HIV makes economic sense, says Stanford study

Eran Bendavid says the results of his work are a departure from a previous study. Earlier research found giving preventative drugs to large groups of gay men at high risk for HIV was not cost-effective when compared with other commonly accepted programs. Read more »

April 9th, 2012

Researchers call for policy, aid and innovation to help world’s poorest

Bill Gates spoke to a Stanford audience about the importance of foreign aid and product innovation in the fight against chronic hunger, poverty and disease in the developing world. FSI senior fellows Larry Diamond, Jeremy Weinstein, Paul Wise and Walter Falcon share their own ideas about how to secure the most fragile nations. Read more »

April 5th, 2012

Award offers researchers $100,000 for improving health care access

The $100,000 award will go to a non-tenured professor, post-doctoral student or research associate during a two-year period. The deadline to apply is May 11. Read more »

March 29th, 2012

Q&A: Bhattacharya on what's at stake in health care case

With legal arguments at the Supreme Court over, the fate of the Obama administration's health care law is in the hands of the justices. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford Center for Health Policy core faculty member, explains how consumers could be affected. Read more »

March 13th, 2012

Two Open Faculty Positions

Douglas Owens, Director of the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research is pleased to announce a search for two faculty positions. This is an exciting opportunity to strengthen our programs and focus on health economics and health policy in both domestic and international settings. Read more »

February 21st, 2012

Expensive and unpleasant, but hepatitis C treatment is worth it, study shows

Research led by by Stanford Health Policy's Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert shows treatments for hepatitis C are cost-effective for patients with advanced disease. Their results are based on a computer model of hepatitis C.

• » AARP: Inside E Street Silent Epidemic: Hepatitis C More than 3 million Americans, most of them boomers, carry the potentially deadly virus (Video)

Read more »

February 16th, 2012

Owens appointed to national task force

The CHP/PCOR director has been appointed to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a group that develops national guidelines for preventive services. Read more »

January 11th, 2012

Health insurance no guarantee for diabetes care in developing countries

Without good health care, diabetics run the risk of developing more health problems. Stanford researchers say those complications will put a greater strain on the patients and the countries where they live – a problem that can be addressed with improvements to health and insurance systems. Read more »

October 7th, 2011

Douglas Owens takes helm of health policy and research centers

The professor of medicine and general internist was one of the first faculty members to join CHP/PCOR when the centers were founded in 1998. Much of his work on HIV and cardiovascular disease has focused on measuring the benefits of certain treatments and interventions against their costs. Read more »

September 27th, 2011

Abortions in Africa increase despite Republican policy to curb payment for procedures

In the first study to examine American foreign aid restrictions for abortion services, FSI researchers Eran Bendavid and Grant Miller find that restricting funding for family planning organizations that support abortions increased abortions in Africa.
Read more »

July 7th, 2011

The Benefits of Health Insurance for the Poor

When poor people are given medical insurance, they not only find regular doctors and see doctors more often but they also feel better, are less depressed and are better able to maintain financial stability, according to a new, large-scale study that provides the first rigorously controlled assessment of the impact of Medicaid. Those who do not have health insurance tend to be different in many ways from people who have it, says Alan Garber, MD head of Stanford Health Policy.

• » New York Times: First Study of its Kind Shows Benefit of Providing Medical Insurance to Poor

May 20th, 2011

Population Reference Bureau interviews Alan Garber

In an interview with the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), Alan Garber discusses cost-effectiveness research and its importance to health care reform. Read more »

Guatemala's Wise 'Doctor Pablo'

In San Juan El Mirador, a traditional town in the highlands of Guatemala 2,500 miles from Stanford, pediatrics professor Paul Wise is working to transform the local medical scene. “Doctor Pablo,” as the locals affectionately call him, has been traveling to Guatemala for 40 years now [meeting] with doctors, policymakers and clinics from the area in an attempt to bring the tiny Guatemalan town up to Western medical standards.

• » Stanford Daily: Guatemala's Wise 'Doctor Pablo'

May 4th, 2011

30th Anniversary for Global Health Scholars Program

Michele Barry, Stanford, and Yale are celebrating an important milestone this week – the 30th anniversary of the Yale/Stanford Johnson and Johnson Global Health Scholars Program Barry founded and runs now at Stanford in collaboration with Yale. Since 1981, the program has sent over 1500 physicians to underserved areas around the world and provided more than $3 million dollars of support. Barry is the Senior Associate Dean for Global Health and Director of the Center for Global Health affiliated with FSI, GSB, and the Woods Institute. Read more »

April 15th, 2011

Alan Garber named Provost of Harvard

Alan Garber, the Henry J. Kaiser, Jr. Professor and Professor of Medicine and Economics, and Director of Stanford Health Policy (Center for Health Policy/Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research), has been named Provost of Harvard University, effective fall 2011. Making the announcement Harvard President Drew Faust said, “Alan is a distinguished academic leader who brings to Harvard an extraordinary breadth of experience in research across disciplines." FSI Director Coit D. Blacker, the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies said, "We congratulate Alan on his appointment as Provost of Harvard. We will miss his probing intellect, his contributions to scholarship and public policy, and his keen appreciation of the challenges facing research universities." In a message to colleagues Alan Garber said, "My time on the faculty at Stanford has been wonderful in every important way. The past 13 years, when CHP and PCOR were created and grew, have been the high point of my Stanford career."

• » Stanford Report: Harvard names Stanford Medical School Professor Alan M. Garber as its next provost
• » Harvard Gazette: Alan Garber named provost

April 13th, 2011

Research casts sober light on Russia's mortality crisis

While many have blamed Russia's economic and political transition for the increase in deaths following the Soviet Union's collapse, Stanford's Grant Miller and Jay Bhattacharya pin new blame on the demise of an effective anti-alcohol campaign. Most of the deaths during Russia's mortality crisis were from alcohol poisoning, drunken violence or slower killers like heart attacks and strokes, said Miller.
Read more »

February 15th, 2011

The 112th Congress: What's in Store for Cancer Care in 2011?

The 111th Congress is gone but not forgotten, having passed into law the landmark Affordable Care Act of 2010. Although this legislation has several interesting appropriations for cancer research, a core principle of the bill is finding ways to reduce health-care spending, which gives the oncology community an uneasy sense of déjà vu: The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 hammered oncology with deep cuts in reimbursement for Part B drugs, leaving many community infusion centers underwater. Oncology practices, especially smaller one- to three-person groups, have to wonder how much more change they can take. Read more »

November 23rd, 2010

Global economic woes make universal access to AIDS drugs unlikely, analysis shows

Universal access to lifesaving AIDS drugs — a United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal that officials hoped to accomplish by 2010 — would require a staggering $15 billion annual investment from the international community at a time when the economic downturn is challenging continued funding for relief efforts, according to a new analysis by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Read more »

November 5th, 2010

Food Summit encourages researchers to collaborate across disciplines

More than 350 members of the campus community attended the inaugural Stanford Food Summit Nov. 3 for a day of cross-disciplinary intellectual ferment about food-related problems. Researchers from all seven Stanford schools gave presentations describing the top food questions in their fields and suggesting ways the university's affiliates could collaborate to address them. Two research-development workshops gave all participants the opportunity to brainstorm how to turn their ideas into concrete research proposals. Read more »

November 4th, 2010

Anti-obesity program for low-income kids show promise, study finds

An approach that attempted to prevent obesity in African American girls improved their cholesterol, diabetes risk and depressive symptoms but had little effect on their weight. Thomas Robinson, professor of pediatrics and medicine, is primary author of the research conducted at the Medical School and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. Read more »

October 11th, 2010

Obese and hungry: Tackling two seemingly opposing public health concerns in India

Obesity is a well-documented problem in developed countries, and Stanford Health Policy researchers have conducted a series of studies on the topic—including one observing its impact on America’s lower-income workers and another study assessing parental effects on childhood obesity in the United States. Read more »

September 27th, 2010

Preventive care poses dilemma for emergency departments, study finds

People go to emergency departments when they've broken a leg, been stabbed or otherwise need urgent care. But a new study from the Stanford Health Policy finds that 90 percent of EDs nationwide also offer preventive-care services. Read more »