Tag: Empirical Legal Research

Variability of US State Workplace Wellness Program Laws

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A team of researchers led by Jennifer Pomeranz, JD, MPH, Clinical Assistant Professor of the College of Global Public Health at New York University, have released a new set of resources that detail characteristics of laws related to workplace wellness programs and identify trends in these laws across the United States: interactive maps for public and private employers at LawAtlas.org and a paper published in the American Journal of Public Health.

Workplace Wellness Program Laws in US

A few key findings:

  • Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia have laws related to workplace wellness programs.
  • Four states (Georgia, Indiana, Maine and Massachusetts) provide tax incentives for work place wellness programs.
  • State laws addressed public and private employers differently, for example, five states permit rewards (e.g., discounts, rebates and waivers) by public employers, whereas 16 states expressly permit positive rewards for participation in programs by private employers.

The research was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Public Health Law Research Program.

Peeling the Onion: How to Promote Pharmaceutical Innovation and Access to Medicine

Timo Minssen 1 Comment

By Timo Minssen

As mentioned in my earlier blog post, I decided to conclude this year by publishing a introductory speech that I gave on April 14th, 2015 at the 2015 Broad Institute Innovation & Intellectual Property Symposium. The speech was part of the session “Bringing Therapies to the Patients” and introduced a panel-discussion with Entrepreneur and Professors of Law and Business about the failures of the patent system to support new therapeutics. The text is below:

Peeling the Onion:
How to Promote Pharmaceutical Innovation and Access to Medicine

Speaking about frustrations over the IP system in pharmaceutical innovation, sometimes feels like – to lend the words of the late German Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass – “peeling an onion:” Read More

New paper on cross-disciplinary collaboration

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By Timo Minssen

The nature of today’s most vital challenges and funding policies are driving more and more researchers towards interdisciplinary work. But what are the essential tools for those breaking the silos and leaving the comfort zones of their own disciplines?

Some advice on how to address the particular challenges and opportunities in interdisciplinary research are described in our recent paper “Ten Simple Rules for a Successful Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration” published in the online open access journal PLOS Computational Biology last month. Please find below and abstract of the paper, which has inter alia been discussed and cited by Times Higher Education.

Abstract:

Cross-disciplinary collaborations have become an increasingly important part of science. They are seen as a key factor for finding solutions to pressing societal challenges on a global scale including green technologies, sustainable food production and drug development. This has also been realized by regulators and policy-makers, as it is reflected in the 80 billion Euro “Horizon 2020” EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. This programme puts special emphasis at breaking down barriers between fields to create a path breaking environment for knowledge, research and innovation.

However, igniting and successfully maintaining cross-disciplinary collaborations can be a delicate task. In this article we focus on the specific challenges associated with cross-disciplinary research in particular from the perspective of the theoretician. As research fellows of the 2020 Science project and collaboration partners, we bring broad experience of developing interdisciplinary collaborations [2–12]. We intend this guide for early career computational researchers as well as more senior scientists who are entering a cross disciplinary setting for the first time. We describe the key benefits, as well as some possible pitfalls, arising from collaborations between scientists with backgrounds in very different fields.

Proposed citation:

Knapp B, Bardenet R, Bernabeu MO, Bordas R, Bruna M, Minssen T, et al. (2015) Ten Simple Rules for a Successful Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration. PLoS Comput Biol 11(4): e1004214. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004214

Building on 20 Years of Success: The Future Role of Law

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By Scott Burris, JD

On this, the last day of National Public Health Week 2015, we’re looking forward by looking backward. There is nothing new about using law and policy to promote healthier environments, products and behavior. There is no good future for public health that does not include even more, and more effective, legal interventions.

Evan Anderson and I wrote in 2012 about the legal regulation of health-related behavior over the past half-century. The story we told offered several reasons for unabashed optimism about what law can do for health. The record is clear that law works, and works across a wide range of different health threats. We pointed to CDC lists of Great Public Health Achievements from the last century and the first decade of the 21st.   Every one of them — from high levels of vaccination, through motor vehicle safety and cancer prevention to maternal and child health – could not have been successful without law and policy. Read More

Making Connections & Collaborating for the Future of Public Health

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As part of the Public Health Law Research program’s participation in National Public Health Week 2015, we have been sharing materials and resources under the daily themes. Today’s theme, Building Broader Connections, is about expanding partnerships and making connections to benefit public health.

We spoke with Laura Hitchcock, JD, Policy Research & Development Specialist for Public Health – Seattle & King County and the King County Executive/Department of Executive Services Partnerships Initiative Lead. We asked her to offer some insight from her work as a lawyer and researcher in a public health department.

PHLR: What role can researchers play in building partnerships with health departments and contributing to the policy-making discussion?

Laura Hitchcock, JD
Laura Hitchcock, JD

LH: Public health researchers can help to support development and refinement of evidence-based policies. Because policies are created in a political process, it is important for public health departments to continue to offer their scientific knowledge to support creation of effective policies, including repeal of ineffective policies or refinement of existing policies to better result in a healthy population by 2030. Health departments may need help to define local or state-focused areas for policy evaluation by working together with researchers, and should contribute to development of research agendas by identifying areas where policy makers, communities, medical professionals and others have concerns about the public’s health, and are likely to need support from researchers to know how to ‘plug in’ to research agenda development. Read More

A Physician Fights Surgery

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Physician and bioethicist Carla C. Keirns described the potentially dangerous impact of medicalization on her own childbirth in the Narrative Matters section of Health Affairs this month. A segment of that writing was reproduced in the Washington Post yesterday.

In each piece, Keirns outlines the challenges she faced in vaginally delivering her son in a hospital environment that seemed committed to performing a caesarian section. Particularly given Keirns’ expertise in and familiarity with health care, the lack of patient-centered care in the story is striking. Several staff suggested that surgery was a foregone conclusion while others appeared unprepared for her son’s long-awaited arrival.

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Happy Public Health Week: “We’re Good Enough, We’re Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Us”

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By Scott Burris

We may be living in a golden age of group-think. A weekly reminder is poor Paul Krugman railing against the apparently universal belief in America and Europe that we’ve got to cut budgets right now or disaster will strike. He calls this a Zombie idea, a false claim that has been falsified with plenty of stakes in the heart, silver bullets and blows to the head, but will not stay in the grave.

Closer to home for us in public health is the claim that Americans don’t like government rules regulating their behavior and meddling with their preferences.  Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have delivered some solid blows to the idea that paternalism typically messes with solid preferences. As we celebrate Public Health Week, I want to highlight two recent papers that show that Americans, like the children in Mary Poppins, actually like their nannies, who do some pretty great things.

Public Health Law Research has recently posted the manuscript of a paper that Evan Anderson and I have prepared for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science. The paper describes the dramatic rise of law as a tool of public health since the 1960s in five major domains: traffic safety, gun violence, tobacco use, reproductive health and obesity.  These topical stories illustrate both law’s effectiveness and limitations as a public health tool. They also establish its popularity by the most apt of metrics – the willingness of legislators to enact it. The one picture worth a thousand words, below, depicts the rapid adoption of a variety of interventions by state legislatures. (By the way, the five examples also show that public health law research can and does influence the development and refinement of legal interventions over time.)

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Flu Vaccine Mandates for Health Care Workers

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According to officials, the worst of this year’s devastating flu season should be over in most parts of the country. But in early January, the flu had hit 47 of 50 states. According to the CDC, a total of 78 influenza-associated pediatric deaths have been reported. Throughout this terrible flu season, there’s been much talk about vaccination mandates for health care workers.

States have started passing legislation regulating health care worker flu vaccination, and an increasing number of hospitals have started implementing policies in attempt to reach the Healthy People 2020 goal of having 90 percent of health care workers vaccinated. Only two-thirds of health care workers were vaccinated against the flu last year. This can leave patients at risk and hospitals short-staffed because of absenteeism.

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