The Dose
The Dose is the Commonwealth Fund’s podcast that presents fresh ideas, new perspectives, and compelling conversations about where health care is headed. Join host Joel Bervell this season for conversations with leading and emerging experts in health care and health policy. Get the Dose in your inbox: https://thedose.show/signup
Episodes
What happens when your zip code threatens your health? Broadband access is often framed as a tech issue, but in some rural communities it’s a matter of health equity. Broadband internet is so limited in some areas that patients can’t use remote monitoring devices, hospitals can’t support telehealth, and electronic health records slow down care instead of streamlining it.
On this week’s episode of The Dose, journalist Sarah Jane Tri...
Data is the engine of health innovation, but too often it can’t tell the full story. On this week’s episode of The Dose, Dr. Sema Sgaier joins host Joel Bervell to talk about the future of equitable health care: how we collect data, who’s included, and what it means for clinical trials, mental health, and the role of AI.
Tune in to hear Dr. Sgaier explain why solving health care’s toughest challenges starts with understanding the h...
We’re in a pivotal moment for health care equity and public health. Systems for tracking data on maternal mortality and chronic disease are being dismantled, with consequences that could last generations.
On this week’s episode of The Dose, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith joins host Joel Bervell to talk about who’s represented in the health data we collect, and who isn’t, and why it’s so important for “people to feel safe in sharing” thei...
When private equity firms buy your local hospital, your primary care doctor’s office, or your local nursing home, they profit. But what happens to those health care institutions, the patients they serve, and the people who work there?
On The Dose this week, Dr. Zirui Song, a renowned expert on private equity in health care, talks with host Joel Bervell about the ways private equity maximize...
As the American Medical Association’s first chief equity officer, Dr. Aletha Maybank guided the legacy medical institution through a difficult reckoning with its past exclusion of Black and women physicians. In a new episode of The Dose, host Joel Bervell talks to Dr. Maybank about how she did it, what lessons the AMA holds for our current moment, and why she has hope that American institutions can ...
Yes, the planet is getting hotter, tropical storms are becoming ever more fierce, and the Arctic is melting — but what’s that got to do with health care? This week on The Dose podcast, host Joel Bervell explores the intersection of climate change and public health with Admiral Rachel L. Levine, M.D., the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health.
Levine, who oversees the federal Office of Climate Change and Health E...
As climate change intensifies and New Yorkers face record-breaking heat, the city is taking new measures to protect residents’ health. Landlords will soon have to provide air conditioning to tenants, school bus fleets are going electric, and efforts are underway to make housing more affordable.
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Evidence of a mental health crisis is everywhere — from the recent surgeon general advisory about social media’s effects on our youth to the pandemic’s documented impact on medical professionals. To whom does a college student turn for help so far from home? And who cares for the mental health of those caring for us?
E...
Moving the needle on health care access and health disparities is no easy task. Inequities for people of color are embedded in the U.S. health system, shaping their health care journeys and often leading to outcomes worse than those experienced by white Americans.
That’s where Dr. Chris Pernell, director of NAACP’s Center for Health Equity, comes in. “Sometime...
In this special two-part edition of The Dose, we’re bringing listeners along to an exhilarating gathering of health care’s most innovative thinkers and changemakers — Aspen Ideas: Health. In part 2, host Joel Bervell talks to two people who are reshaping how we think about community health: Mary Oxendine, a Lumbee and Tuscarora woman and the former North Carolina Food Security Coordinator at Durham ...
In this special, two-part edition of The Dose, we’re bringing listeners along to an exhilarating gathering of health care’s most innovative thinkers and changemakers—Aspen Ideas: Health. In part 1, host Joel Bervell speaks with two people dedicated to supporting communities that have been excluded from our health care system: Lola Adedokun, executive director of the Aspen Global Innovative Group at the Aspen Institute and leader of...
This month, a 12-year-old boy in Washington, D.C., became the first person in the world to undergo a grueling gene therapy treatment that could cure his sickle cell disease. It is a game-changer for a disease whose history has been plagued by the racism baked into our health care system.
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In Dr. Joseph Betancourt’s vision for the future of U.S. health care, “any patient who goes to any health care system around the country should get the highest quality of care, no matter who they are or where they’re from.” As the Commonwealth Fund’s new president, he’s tackling some of the biggest challenges facing the U.S. health system while trying to en...
As a physician, researcher, and educator, Dr. Cheryl R. Clark wants her students to understand what vision, love, and equity can bring to health care if we prioritize them — and why she believes doing so is critical to advancing health equity....
In medical school, students learning about illness, pathology, and disease are trained almost exclusively on images of white patients. Even materials on illnesses that predominantly affect Black people, like sickle cell disease, and textbooks used in medical schools in countries where most people are Black, are filled with illustrations of white bodies and white skin. This leaves doctors underprepared to care for Black patients.
Fo...
Montgomery, Alabama’s capital, is known as the birthplace of gynecology. It’s a brutal history, as the field’s “founding father,” J. Marion Sims, advanced his work through the experimentation on enslaved women and babies. Artist and health care activist Michelle Browder has forced a reckoning with this ...
This year in the United States, an estimated 2 million people will receive a new cancer diagnosis, and a growing proportion will be younger adults and people of color. Many of these cases could be prevented — nearly 60 percent of colorectal cancers, for example, could be avoided with early detection. Read more
Overtreatment is a big problem in American health care. The proliferation of unnecessary medical tests and procedures not only harms patients but costs the United States billions of dollars every year. Between 2019 and 2021, Medicare spent as much as $2.4 billion on unnecessary coronary stents alone. At some hospitals, it’s estimated that more than half of all stents are unwarranted.
For th...
Health care is a $4.3 trillion business in the United States, accounting for 18 percent of the nation’s economy. It should come as no surprise then that the industry has become attractive to private investors, who promise cost savings, expanded use of technology, and streamlined operations.
But according to Yale University’s Howard Forman, M.D., “most private equity money does seem to be ma...
Nearly one in five Americans has medical debt. Black households are disproportionately affected, carrying higher amounts of debt at higher rates.
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