There is much debate about the effects of pharmaceutical direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) on health care use. In this paper, we inform this debate by examining the effects of DTCA on office visits, as well as treatment courses resulting from those visits, for five common chronic conditions...

Objective: To study cross-national inequalities in mortality of adults and of children aged 5 years using a novel approach, with clustering techniques to stratify countries into mortality groups (better-off, worse-off, mid-level) and to examine risk factors associated with inequality. Design,...

Background: A world divided by health inequalities poses ethical challenges for global health. International and national responses to health disparities must be rooted in ethical values about health and its distribution; this is because ethical claims have the power to motivate, delineate...

Despite a culture of innovation, the U.S. health care system has been markedly deficient in its implementation of information technology (IT). Although recent initiatives have endeavored to remedy this shortcoming, fragmentation, high costs, information asymmetries, and evolving regulatory...

On October 26, 2012, the University of Akron School of Law’s Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential...

Billions of dollars have been spent on pilot programs searching for ways to reduce healthcare costs. I study one such program, where hospitals pay doctors bonuses for reducing the total hospital costs of admitted Medicare patients (a “bundled payment�). Doctors respond to the...

In this article, we discuss the public health provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). We first set forth a framework to identify the key reforms that are needed for a robust public health system. These include workforce and infrastructure investments. We then assess...

This paper studies the performance of immigrants relative to natives, in terms of their health status, use of health care services, lifestyles, and coverage of health expenditures. We base the analysis on international evidence that identified a healthy immigrant effect, complemented by...

Virtual health is the sum of telehealth (patient–provider communication at a distance) and autonomous health (electronic devices communicating with providers and patients at a distance). The COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant social distancing led to a sharp increase in the use of virtual...