With all the mobile apps and resources available for games, entertainment and media, have you ever thought about the impact that mobile apps could have on your health? Introducing mHealth, the term used to describe the use of your mobile phone for health. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies released a report entitled “Minorities, Mobile Broadband, and the Management of Chronic Diseases,” which evaluates the vast potential of mobile broadband technologies to help address our nation’s most pressing health concerns.

Currently, chronic diseases disproportionately affect minority communities. These diseases include diabetes, heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and obesity to name a few. The CDC reports that each year 7 out of 10 Americans die from illnesses related to chronic disease. Heart disease, cancer, and stroke account for more than 50% of all deaths in the US. In 2007, $2.2 trillion was spent on healthcare in the US, with $1.7 trillion spent to prevent and treat chronic illnesses. Eventhough chronic diseases affect minority communities disproportionately, many individuals lack the ability to effectively treat and monitor their health due to geographic, financial, cultural and linguistic barriers. Considering these facts, mHealth is our answer to breaking down these barriers.

Read more at Politic365.

Orleans Parish PLACE MATTERS Team Leader Andre Perry speaks to 89.9 WWNO about PLACE MATTERS and community advocacy in New Orleans.

A sense of place is powerful in New Orleans, where people tend to identify strongly with their neighborhoods. But while the culture and tradition of these neighborhoods may enrich the local lifestyle, a new initiative is analyzing how other particulars of place can have precisely the opposite effect. The program is called Orleans Place Matters and it takes a hard look at neighborhood-level factors ranging from housing and transportation to discrimination and the legacy of segregation.

“So we see and are not surprised by the Lower Ninth Ward, Central City, parts of Treme, parts of the Seventh Ward with extremely low life outcomes, because of the history, because of the inability to bring equity to those places,” says Andre Perry, an education policy expert at Loyola University. “Just to be clear, in some communities, the life expectancy rate is 55.5 years compared to 80 for others, so there’s a stark difference.”

Perry is the team leader for Orleans Place Matters. This local program is part of a national initiative from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a research group based in Washington, D.C. In cities across the country, its Place Matters program gives community organizations the data and analysis they need, both to understand what factors impact health in their neighborhoods and to advocate for effective change.

“We’re going to continue to produce reports and produce data that community members can leverage to get better policy for their communities,” Perry says. “Families need data to go to city council and go to the mayor and say, look this is what’s happening. And so we want to provide that data for them.”

Read more and listen to the radio story at 89.9 WWNO.

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies applauds a new report released yesterday by Community Catalyst on the practice patterns of dental therapists, who are mid-level providers of oral health care.  The report, entitled The Economic Viability of Dental Therapists, is the first assessment of how mid-level dental providers, specifically dental therapists, are practicing in the United States.  

Oral health care disparities are some of the deepest and most persistent health disparities in the United States.  People who have low incomes, children, racial and ethnic minorities, older adults and residents of rural communities face an array of barriers to accessing routine and preventive dental care. Yet dental disease is the number one chronic illness affecting children, and is more common than asthma. Seventy-two percent of American Indian and Alaska Native children aged six to eight have untreated cavities—more than twice the rate of the general population.  Thirty-seven percent of non-Hispanic black children and 41 percent of Hispanic children have untreated tooth decay, compared with 25 percent of white children.

The Economic Viability report assesses dental therapists practicing in Alaska and Minnesota, and finds that they have effectively expanded access to routine and preventive oral health care for low-income adults, children, and people living in tribal communities. The report finds that 85 percent of the care dental therapists provide is routine and preventive, and that dental therapists cost their employers less than 30 cents for every dollar of revenue they generate.

“The report comes at a time when more than a dozen states are exploring using mid-level dental providers as a way to greatly expand access to dental care,” said Brian D. Smedley, Ph.D., Vice President and Director of the Joint Center’s Health Policy Institute. “Eight states have put forward legislation seeking to authorize dental therapists. Several other states have called for studying the model further. Outside of the U.S., dental therapists have practiced successfully in more than 50 other countries for the better part of a century. We believe they are an important part of a comprehensive strategy to reduce and ultimately eliminate oral health care disparities.”
 

Download the entire press release by clicking the icon below.

This morning, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ Health Policy Institute hosted members of Congress and a panel of local leaders for a congressional briefing on health inequities.  Panelists discussed their experience with the center’s PLACE MATTERS program, an initiative dedicated to helping local leaders to identify and improve social, economic and environmental conditions that shape health in their communities.

The PLACE MATTERS Program aims to advance health equity by acknowledging racial inequities as the “root cause” of health inequities in communities across the U.S. Research commissioned by the Joint Center estimated the cost of health inequalities experienced by African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos to be $1.24 trillion from 2003-2006, prompting a desire to further the analysis and advance creative policy solutions through the development of the PLACE MATTERS program, operated since 2006. Place Matters teams work in 24 jurisdictions in 10 states and the District of Columbia, using research to build a case around the root causes of health disparities and developing innovative policy solutions to improve health.

Representatives Barbara Lee (CA-9), Jim McDermott (WA-7) and Robin Kelly (IL-2) attended the briefing, acknowledging the connection between local conditions and community health. Rep. Barbara Lee told the group, “Our health really is determined by our environment – place matters.”

Read more at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Dr. Brian Smedley delivers the keynote address at the 34th Annual Minority Health Conference at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Deborah Lewis is a licensed social worker serving court-referred elderly clients in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Her work takes her to two hospitals, each in different zip codes in the city. She recently sat in the outpatient waiting area in the two different hospitals within a 48-hour period.

She was shocked and dismayed by the stark contrasts in the "health" of the populations at each location.

The predominately middle-class, largely white, elderly outpatients at one hospital were walking without walkers. Most were clearly there for wellness and prevention services.

Across town in the largest hospital serving African-Americans and Latinos, Deborah recalled being overwhelmed by the high levels of debilitation among these outpatients -- wheelchairs, walkers, canes were the norm, not the exception. Most of these patients were struggling to manage chronic diseases.

It was for her, an African-American professional and a baby boomer, a painful reminder that where you live in America makes a significant difference in your risk for illness and premature death.

Here in the United States, a zip code can tell us a lot about how well and how long you'll live. So can census tracts. Most people are stunned to hear the differences:

• In Bernalillo County, N.M., home to Albuquerque, people in some census tracts live an average of 22 years less than those in other some tracts.
• In Boston, the difference in life expectancy by census tracts is 33 years.
• In Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago, the difference is 18 years. (These figures come from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies' Place Matters reports.)

What's behind these differences in life expectancy? Disparities in neighborhood conditions. Our history of residential segregation has concentrated not just certain communities (typically communities of color), but also poverty.

Read more at The Huffington Post.

In 2004, the Sullivan Commission on Diversity in the Healthcare Workforce found that "the civil rights movement of the 1960s ended the more visible racial and ethnic barriers, but it did not eliminate entrenched patterns of inequality in healthcare, which remain the unfinished business of the civil rights movement." Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher told Crisis magazine at the time that the health disparities that existed were a matter of life and death and a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering.

Fast-forward a decade and not much has changed.

Nearly 50 percent of African Americans suffer from some type of chronic disease -- including diabetes and certain cancers -- compared to 39 percent of the general population. The life expectancy of African Americans is five years less than that of whites due to conditions such as heart disease and stroke. Blacks have a higher prevalence of high blood pressure or hypertension than any other group. African Americans are twice as likely to have diabetes than whites and more likely to be overweight and obese than their white counterparts.

Even the nation's first black president has taken note of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes as the striking health disparities between African Americans and other racial groups.

"We know that even as spiraling health care costs crush families of all races, African Americans are more likely to suffer from a host of diseases but less likely to own health insurance than just about anyone else," President Obama said in July 2009.

Currently an estimated 20 percent of African Americans are uninsured (pdf), contributing to the growing health disparities that exist in America's communities. Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.) introduced legislation to create an annual report on health disparities.

"Every person," said Davis, "should have access to high quality comprehensive health care that is affordable to them without regard to their ability to pay."

President Obama signed the historic Affordable Health Care Act in 2010, which extended health care coverage to 7 million African Americans.

"There's a lot in this law for people of color," said Brian Smedley, vice president and director of the health policy institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, in an interview with The Root.

Smedley pointed to many provisions that are already in effect. For example, insurance companies can no longer deny claims based on pre-existing conditions, and young adults can now stay on their parents' health care plan until they reach age 26. That means 230,000 black women and 180,000 black men between the ages of 19 and 25 can continue to have health insurance under their parents' plan. The legislation also raised the eligibility requirements for Medicaid, providing 4 million more African Americans access to health insurance coverage. Seniors will now be able to get annual wellness exams, diabetes screenings and colorectal cancer screenings.

Read more at The Root.

The report, “Place Matters for Health in Baltimore:  Ensuring Opportunities for Good Health for All,” finds that residents’ place of residence is an important indicator of their health and health risks.  Importantly, because of persistent racial and class segregation, place of residence is an especially important driver of the poorer health outcomes of the city’s non-white and low-income residents.

The report, prepared by the Joint Center and the Baltimore Place Matters team, Equity Matters, Inc., in conjunction with the Center for Human Needs at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia Network for Geospatial Health Research, was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) of the National Institutes of Health.   The study provides a comprehensive analysis of the range of social, economic, and environmental conditions in Baltimore—particularly as it relates to the quality of housing and educational opportunities—and documents their relationship to the health status of the city’s residents. 

The study finds that social, economic, and environmental conditions in low-income and non-white neighborhoods make it more difficult for people in these neighborhoods to live healthy lives.  Among the study’s key findings are that life expectancy in Baltimore varies by as much as 30 years depending on the census tract, and that census tracts with the lowest life expectancy tend to have a higher percentage of people of color and low-income residents.  Community-level risk factors, such as poor quality housing and education, are among the factors that predict health inequalities in the city.  Residents in census tracts characterized by a high density of liquor stores, vacant properties, rodent- or insect-infested homes, and lead exposure have an average life expectancy that is six to nine years shorter than residents of census tracts with the lowest rates of these characteristics.  Similarly, residents in areas with a better educational environment—such as a greater percentage of adults with a bachelor’s degree, lower school absenteeism rates, and fewer students scoring below basic proficiency levels—live nearly nine years longer than residents of neighborhoods with poorer educational environments.

WASHINGTON, DC – The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies will release a report, “Place Matters for Health in Baltimore:  Ensuring Equitable Opportunities for Good Health.”

The report documents a 30-year difference in life expectancy across census tracts in the city.  Census tracts with a high proportion of people of color, the report finds, disproportionately suffer from a lack of investment in the opportunity structures that help people to be healthy, such as high-quality schools and housing.  Conversely, these communities tend to host a disproportionate concentration of health risks, such as environmental degradation, vendors selling unhealthy products, and unsafe streets.

The report offers a number of policy strategies to address these neighborhood-level health risks.  Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) will comment on the report.

For full details click the link below.