🚨New Data alert! 🚨 The 2024 5-year American Community Survey (ACS) and Puerto Rico Community Survey (PRCS) data are now available on IPUMS USA. usa.ipums.org

Bar chart titled "Allocation of Hospital Profits to Charity Care and Cash Reserves (2012–2019)" showing the estimated association between a $1 increase in hospital profit and changes in charity care spending versus cash reserves, broken out by hospital type. For charity care, all three groups show near-zero allocation: nonprofit hospitals $0, for-profit hospitals $0.04, and combined $0. For cash reserves, all three groups show allocations well above $1: nonprofit hospitals $1.73, for-profit hospitals $1.92, and combined $1.74. Source: Jenkins & Ho, Health Affairs, June 2023.

Continuing on the Vivian Ho fest from yesterday, let's talk about her paper "Nonprofit Hospitals: Profits and Cash Reserves Grow, Charity Care Does Not," Health Affairs, June 2023.

Between 2012 and 2019, mean nonprofit hospital operating profits grew from $43M to $58.6M, but

Table 2: Health Care Equity Consult Service (HECS) Case Summaries and Interventions. It lists patient demographics like Adult male (C1), Pediatric male (C2), Adult female (C3) & Adult male (C4), reason for referral, clinical condition, health equity factors, HECS interventions & outcome.

A structured #HealthEquity consult service supported patient-centered care, increasing awareness of social determinants and informing clinical decisions and institutional policies across diverse hospital settings.

ja.ma/4bawS47

Without naming your job, tell me something you say over and over again at work.

“Of course, I can add that and run the analysis again. I don’t mind.”

“Please let me know if you think the article is ready for submission.”

Yeah, exempt.

Well I’m jealous! I’m going on 7 weeks in pre-review.

Seasonal green space, air pollution, and temperature in the United States: Spatial disparities among people with disabilities This paper advances research on environmental justice through analysis of multiple concurrent environmental exposures (green space, air pollution, tem…

Excited that this paper is out!

We applied co-location multivariate local join statistics & Generalized Additive Models to assess the joint vulnerabilities to dimensions of environmental injustice at the nexus of income, race, and disability across the U.S. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Went with 'other' under Health Equity after way too much internal debate lol

I'm torn mostly between the 'other' subtopic under Health Equity, or the same under Mental Health.

I'm submitting an abstract on Hispanic/Latino firearm suicide deaths and their preceding circumstances as a late breaker at AcademyHealth and have come to the perennial debate: which topic and subtopic to submit it under. What would you guys do? academyhealth.confex.com/academyhealt...

JAMA Health Forum: Research Letter on 'Racial Disparities in Food Insecurity for High- and Low-Income Households' by Cordelia Kwon, Yifan Liu, Deidra C. Crews, et al. Published March 6, 2026.

This study of nearly 1 million US households from 2000 to 2023 found racial disparities in #FoodInsecurity among both higher- and low-income groups, highlighting the continued role of structural racism and the value of federal nutrition programs.

ja.ma/4sqtSpI

A light orange cat with green eyes sits on a grey office chair and looks up at the camera.

Went to refill my water bottle and came back to find a chair stealer. Tempted to let him have it and be done with work for the day!

They’re huge cats too, so the food costs are astronomical!

John Green might be cool. He has written fiction involving disease before (cancer) and recently wrote a non-fiction book about tuberculosis. His memoir also included a chapter about plagues, if I remember correctly.

🚨POST AN EMERGENCY CAT PIC🚨
Brothers!

There are a whole bunch of studies underway using this survey data, including two that I led. Hopefully we’ll see more of them published soon!

Some key takeaways:
- Veterans with the PTSD, polytrauma, and chronic disease phenotypes tend to feel that pain interferes with their life
- Those with polytrauma or bipolar/substance use disorder phenotypes feel sleep problems interfere with their life

Another paper I worked on got published recently! It’s on comorbidity phenotypes in veterans with epilepsy, pain, sleep, and dissociation.

psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

I’m glad to see people are getting something out of it.

I loved doing this paper, even though it wasn’t the sort of thing I usually worked on. It was really exciting to me to have randomly gotten super curious about something and been able to answer the question for myself (to the extent you can with just one study).

The data suggested FDA approval may have been related to a reduction in first doses and an increase in second doses.

It made me wonder what FDA approval would do, given that the vaccine was already available and some people might therefore experience FDA approval as something similar to what was explored in the news article: a plea for vaccination from an authority figure. So I tried to find out!

Did LDS Church statement move the needle on vaccines and masking? Yes and no. After top leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made an impassioned plea for members to mask up and get vaccinated, did church congregations heed that call?

I actually got the idea to do this from an article in my local newspaper, which published an article that tried to figure out whether local religious leaders’ calls for people to be vaccinated had any effect. www.sltrib.com/religion/202...

Vaccine Uptake in the US After Full FDA Approval of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine This cross-sectional study examines the association of full approval of the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with subsequent US uptake of COVID-19 vaccines of any kin...

Here’s my COVID paper that they cited: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

This paper is so cool to me. I’m not an infectious disease or vaccine person (although I did one paper on vaccine uptake during COVID—like everyone else I was briefly a COVID researcher lol). I’m super interested in health geography though, so I’m way into this paper.

They found that COVID-19 vaccine barriers (like housing inadequacy, group quarters, and population density) cluster in certain geographic areas. My takeaway: people in some areas experience more vaccine barriers than others, which may lead to lower vaccination, and maybe more disease in those areas.

Since I’m a relatively newly-minted researcher, I’m still enjoying the fun that is seeing other people cite my work. Here’s one that was published recently: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Pandemic-related increases in telehealth use have persisted beyond the COVID-19 period. Sex, health insurance status, age, and family income were significant predictors of telehealth utilization. Check out our newly published paper! Mdpi.com/2227-9032/14/3/331

I’m really interested in getting into health geography and the impact of place on mental health, so this is my jam.

Diagram showing pathways through which new green space can impact residents’ mental health in positive and negative ways. Positive: therapeutic value of visits to green space, aesthetic value, sense of community Negative: barriers to use of new green space, sense of exclusion, increased surveillance, discrimination, perceived lack of safety, fear of exposures to historical contaminants in the area, loss of community and feeling unwelcome due to neighborhood demographic change, financial stress, risk of becoming unhoused, and landlord neglect

The less basic idea here: