Healthy Intersections

Welcome! This month's special guest is Dr. Kristen Brown, a senior research associate at Urban Institute. We discuss her recent publication Still Separate, Still Not Equal: An ecological examination of redlining and racial segregation with COVID-19 vaccination administration in Washington DC. We talk about methods for measuring racial residential segregation and contemporary/historical redlining, and we discuss the implications of the paper's findings. Racial residential segregation in the US is persistent and associated with racial health inequities, including in COVID-19 infections, testing, and vaccination. For more details, visit https://www.themedicalcareblog.com/podcast-racial-segregation/.

 This month marks the 10-year anniversary (blogiversary) of The Medical Care Blog, where we focus on the intersection of public health and medical care. To celebrate this milestone, we are dedicating this month's podcast to a blog-focused episode featuring special guests Greg Stevens and Ben King, co-editors of this blog (and absolutely wonderful colleagues). Visit the blog today to see the video for this episode and learn more about becoming a contributor! 

This month's podcast features a roundtable on the new Local Climate Impact pilot project from the RTI Rarity team. Special guests Aditya Vadalkar, MS, Bahamin Ayla Akhtari, MS, and Sourabh Deshmukh, MS discuss our project, focused on three domains: climate-related risk, community resilience, and community vulnerability.

We also present interactive maps of our in-progress dashboard featuring California and Florida. The dashboard allows us to explore those states' current risk, resilience, and vulnerability along with simulation modeling of the potential local impact of climate change in the future.

Episode video at https://www.themedicalcareblog.com/podcast-local-climate-impact/ 

It's July, 2024. Happy summer! This month, we talk with Emily Parker, a marine scientist and advocate with Heal the Bay, a nonprofit aquarium and institute based in Santa Monica, CA. The video below is an in-depth discussion of ocean health and human health — and how they intersect. Video and transcript at https://www.themedicalcareblog.com/podcast-ocean-human-health/

June is Alzheimer's Awareness Month. To recognize the importance of brain health, we hosted a round-table discussion between Dr. Lisa Lines, principal investigator for the RTI Rarity project (RTIRarity.io); Chloe McGlynn, a research public health analyst at RTI; Dr. Vicki Johnson-Lawrence, social epidemiologist and community-based participatory researcher at RTI; and Dr. Jazmyne McNeese, an expert on race, wealth, and business ownership and senior data analyst at PolicyMap (PolicyMap.com). We discuss disparities in the prevalence of Alzheimer's Disease & Related Dementias, or ADRD, and explore some of the top modifiable risk factors for ADRD. We share ideas for improving access to care for people with ADRD and show how prevalence, and some of the top predictors, are distributed across the US. You can watch the video for this episode, and leave your feedback, at https://www.themedicalcareblog.com/podcast-adrd-2024-06/.

March, 2024: Four years since the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, where are we now? What accounts for more than 1 million Americans dead? We talk with Christina van Hal and Nate Rowan, researchers at RTI International, about our analyses of excess mortality from 2020-2022.

Welcome to the February, 2024 edition of the Healthy Intersections Podcast! This month, we sit down with David Introcaso, PhD, to discuss the healthcare industry's carbon footprint. Dr. Introcaso is the host and producer of the Healthcare Policy Podcast as well as an experienced researcher.

He talks us through understanding the scope of the problem and makes excellent points about the role of policies in addressing the climate crisis. Why not require healthcare organizations to publicly report their carbon footprints and what they are doing about sustainability? How else can we decarbonize the industry? If the healthcare industry leads on sustainability, it could transform the supply chain!

Be sure to visit The Medical Care Blog to access an extensive set of notes and further reading provided by Dr. Introcaso. Please share widely!

January, 2024:  We're kicking off a year of climate action here on the podcast and blog. To start us off, we interview Dr. Imari Walker-Franklin, a research chemist at RTI International, science communicator, and the co-author of a new book from MIT Press, Plastics. We connect the dots between climate change, public health and medical care, and plastics, covering multiple angles and identifying priorities for research to fill the gaps in our knowledge. 

On the Healthy Intersections podcast for November 2023, we do a deep dive on structural racism and its effects in the United States. Joining us to talk about the new Structural Racism Effect Index (SREI) is Dr. Zach Dyer, lead author on the analysis. Check out the dashboard at SREIndex.com and the journal article in Health Affairs. A video of our discussion is available at The Medical Care Blog.

 Welcome to the Healthy Intersections podcast for October, 2023. Today's podcast focuses on the links between suicide and social determinants of health in the United States. Suicide is one of the deaths of despair, along with deaths from drug and alcohol. We will be discussing some key statistics and findings related to this topic as well as discussing a new study on the topic.