Ashok Reddy, MD, is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Clinical Scholar in residence at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.  This is part of a series of essays, reprinted from the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics’ eMagazine, in which scholars who attended the recent AcademyHealth National Health Policy Conference reflect on the experience.

With the debate about the fiscal cliff and the sequester hanging so heavily over Washington, it was no surprise that congressional staffers at the AcademyHealth National Health Policy Conference seemed so exclusively focused on cutting health care spending. Some estimated that 30 percent of the $2.5 trillion spent on health care may provide little value; finding interventions that provide high-value care is a top priority that tends to obscure any other possibilities.

In this prevailing atmosphere of stark fiscal reality and gridlocked politics it can be hard to gain traction for the idea that investing in programs that prevent chronic diseases would ultimately decrease the costly long-term expenditures driven by those diseases. But that’s where traction is needed.

Take diabetes for instance. One estimate has the medical treatments for people with diabetes costing 2.4 times more than expenditures that would be incurred by the same group in the absence of diabetes. By preventing the development of diabetes in an individual you decrease the risk of heart attack, kidney failure and amputated extremities.

It is true that, so far, research in cost-effectiveness analyses has not shown that prevention reduces medical costs. Besides childhood vaccination and flu shots for the elderly, few health care services ‘save money.’ A 2010 Health Affairs article calculated that if 90 percent of the U.S. population used proven preventive services, it would save only 0.2 percent of health care spending.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative (INQRI) will present the next webinar in its “Translating Research into Practice” series on March 12.

INQRI grantees Marita Titler, PhD, RN, FAAN, and Paul Conlon, PharmD, JD, will present their research on reducing falls in hospitals by implementing a risk specific fall prevention bundle. Titler and Conlon’s 18-month study implemented fall prevention interventions targeted to patient risk factors, and evaluated the use and impact of these practices.

The webinar will take place from 4-5 p.m. EST.

Register for the webinar.
Learn more about the research.

Jason Corburn, PhD, MCP, is associate professor at the School Public Health & Department of City & Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley.  He is a recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Investigator Award in Health Policy Research and an RWJF Health & Society Scholar. This post is part of the "Health Care in 2013" series.

The U.S. health care system must stop treating people only to send them back into the living, working and playing conditions that are making them sick in the first place. Glaring health inequities continue to persist in our metropolitan areas – differences in life expectancy, disease and disability by racial and ethnic groups and neighborhood location.  Our zip codes are often a greater predictor of our likelihood of disease, disability and early death than our genetic code.  We need to shift our health care system from a focus largely on cures to preventing illness and death by improving our living, working and playing environments.

2013 must be the year we all view community development and city planning as ‘preventative medicine.’

Last week, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and The Alliance for Health Reform sponsored a briefing to discuss oral health care in the United States, particularly for children and other vulnerable populations.

The discussion was co-moderated by David Krol, MD, MPH, FAAP, RWJF Human Capital Portfolio team director and senior program officer. “Oral health is an integral part of overall health,” he said. It faces the same challenges as overall health care, including “racial, ethnic, geographic disparities in disease and access to care, financing challenges, issues of determining and maintaining quality of care, and workforce controversies.” Krol said he would like to see “all conversations on health and health care… naturally include oral health.”

In 2009, preventable dental conditions accounted for more than 830,000 emergency department visits nationwide, Julie Stitzel, MA, of the Pew Center on the States’ Children’s Dental Campaign told the audience. Children were the patients for 50,000 of those visits. “There’s a real opportunity for states to save money because these visits, again, are totally preventable,” she said. “We know that getting treated in an emergency room is much more costly than the care delivered in a dental office, and states are bearing a significant share of these expenses through Medicaid and other public programs.”

Around the country, print, broadcast and online media outlets are covering the groundbreaking work of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) leaders, scholars, fellows and grantees. Some recent examples:

“Preventing diseases before they start is one of the most common sense ways to keep people healthy,” writes Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, MD, MBA, RWJF president and CEO, in a blog post for The Atlantic, “but this nation continues to focus too narrowly on treating medical conditions after they occur.” Lavizzo-Mourey’s essay is part of the “America the Fixable” series, hosted by Atlantic.com in partnership with Common Good. See the full series here.

A study led by RWJF/U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA) Clinical Scholar Charles Scales, MD, finds that the number of Americans suffering from kidney stones has nearly doubled since 1994, due in large part to the increase in obesity and diabetes, WTVD (Raleigh-Durham, N.C.) reports. “While we expected the prevalence of kidney stones to increase, the size of the increase was surprising,” Scales said. HealthDay also reported on the findings.

Kavita Patel, MD, MSHS, an alumna of the Clinical Scholars program, was a guest on NPR for a story that asked “Does Race Affect Your Hospital Stay?” The story keyed off findings from Sick in America, a poll commissioned by RWJF, NPR and the Harvard School of Public Health to better understand Americans’ experiences and attitudes related to the cost and quality of their medical care. Nearly half of respondents said that a lack of cultural understanding plays a big role in the problems with U.S. health care quality, the story reports.

Dominick L. Frosch, PhD, an alumnus of the RWJF Health & Society Scholars program, continues to receive media coverage for a study he led that finds some patients are afraid or feel they are unable to speak up and participate in shared decision making with their physicians. American Medical News and Forbes are among the outlets to report on the findings.