Health Affairs

The May GrantWatch column in Health Affairs focuses on efforts of foundations around the United States to address the problems of ‘food deserts’—low-income communities where there are limited locations for residents to buy reasonably priced fresh fruits and vegetables. The topic of food deserts can be controversial in some quarters: Did you see the recent... Read the rest of this entry »

I always enjoy my annual trip to Grantmakers In Health’s (GIH’s) big conference. This year I did not have far to go—Baltimore. So, here is my “reporter’s notebook,” as Katie Couric would say. In this round-up post, I mention some interesting things I heard at the opening speech by GIH’s president and CEO and at... Read the rest of this entry »

Derek Yach, senior vice president for global health and agriculture policy at PepsiCo, was one of the plenary speakers at the recent Grantmakers In Health (GIH) Annual Meeting, held in Baltimore. A strategist, Yach previously has held positions at the Rockefeller Foundation, Yale University, and the World Health Organization (WHO). His remarks provided “food for... Read the rest of this entry »

The author explains the concept and how it can help safety-net patients. David also alerts us to the Health Home Innovation Fund, managed by Tides’s Community Clinics Initiative and funded by the California Endowment. He thanks Jane Stafford, managing director of the initiative, for her help with this post. Among the many provisions of the Affordable Care Act, one of the most... Read the rest of this entry »

Read news about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Greenwall Foundation, and Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky. See descriptions of two policy jobs at health foundations. These tidbits recently came across my desk. •The Greenwall Foundation’s website notes that effective January 1, 2012, its grant making “will focus solely on building and enriching the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program... Read the rest of this entry »

Overuse of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance are serious problems that many people seem unaware of. Witness those who go into a physician’s office with a bad cold and insist upon being prescribed an antibiotic. A cold is caused by a virus, and antibiotics are ineffective on viruses. In today’s post, GrantWatch Blog looks at some... Read the rest of this entry »

Check these out in case you missed them when they first came out on GrantWatch Blog. 1. “Rural Health: Report from the Kentucky Health Policy Forum,” by Susan Zepeda and Amy Watts (September 23). Once again, this post by two staffers at the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, in Louisville, made the most-read list. This... Read the rest of this entry »

An e-alert describing a new report caught my eye. Who would have anticipated these results? The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), which announced back in 2007 that it would commit at least $500 million to reversing the childhood obesity problem by 2015, funded the work that led to the report (described below) about the effects on business... Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time to let you know of the most-read GrantWatch Blog posts during September—in case you missed them when they first came out. (1) “Philanthropy People Post: Who Is Working Where, Who Has Been Appointed to a Board,” by Health Affairs Senior Editor/GrantWatch, Lee-Lee Prina (September 8). Periodically, I write a blog post focused on people.... Read the rest of this entry »

Why did the Duke Endowment decide to select disease prevention as one of its three major funding areas in health care? Why would a private foundation invest in programs and infrastructure to prevent disease when the number of uninsured is growing and there is not enough funding available to treat people burdened with chronic disease? ... Read the rest of this entry »

This blogger, a former president of a foundation, writes that the value of public health infrastructure is sometimes forgotten. Investing in our public health infrastructure saves lives. That’s the bottom-line message of a recent Health Affairs article entitled Evidence Links Increases in Public Health Spending to Declines in Preventable Deaths. Its authors lay out the... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: You’ve heard of an Accountable Care Organization, haven’t you? Now read about a new initiative—an Accountable Care Community—in this northeastern Ohio city. In response to chronic health conditions, the Austen BioInnovation Institute in Akron (ABIA), its founding members, and numerous community organizations have joined to launch a first-of-its-kind Accountable Care Community, which will use... Read the rest of this entry »

Read about this exciting project involving more than 100,000 Kaiser Permanente health plan members. Because this is a new area for me (I mostly write about health policy and what foundations are funding in that area), I wanted to find a good definition of genomics that is easily understandable by the nonscientist: Genomics. . .... Read the rest of this entry »

Read below about some comings and goings at foundations around the country. Abraham Daniels has joined the Sierra Health Foundation. He is in charge of the foundation’s new health initiative that aims to strengthen the main health care safety net in the Sacramento, California, region, according to Sierra’s newsletter. Most recently, Daniels was director of... Read the rest of this entry »

Below we have listed the three most-read posts. Take a look in case you missed them when the original tweets and e-alerts mentioning them were sent out. 1. “Southern Foundations Discuss PACE: Comprehensive Care to Help Elderly Age in Place,” by Tina Markanda (May 6). Markanda, a program officer at the Duke Endowment, writes about... Read the rest of this entry »

These authors from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Pfizer Inc, respectively, discuss what has been learned thus far from this program funded by Pfizer and the Pfizer Foundation. Noncommunicable diseases have become an important global health concern—they account for 60 percent of all deaths worldwide, or about 35 million deaths, a year with... Read the rest of this entry »

“Philanthropy at the Intersection of Health and the Environment,” by Karla Fortunato and Kathy Sessions of the Health and Environmental Funders Network (HEFN), was released earlier this month in the May issue of Health Affairs, a thematic issue on “environmental challenges for health.” The Kresge Foundation provided funding for the journal issue on this important... Read the rest of this entry »

We list below the three most-read posts during the month. Take a look in case you missed one of these when the original tweet or e-alert went out. 1. “Foundation Blogs Round-up: Community Clinics, Health Reform, Health IT, & More,” by Lee-Lee Prina (March 31). First on the most-read list during April was a selected... Read the rest of this entry »

I have rounded up a list of recent posts from health philanthropy blogs and philanthropy-in-general blogs that caught my eye. For more blog reading, see GrantWatch Blog’s Blogroll (look to the right!). Environmental Health “Good Health Should Begin at Home, so Why Is Housing Making Kids Sick?” (Apr. 10). Ben Starrett tells us that “generations of chronic disinvestment in... Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s another quick listing of recent foundation-related blog posts that you may want to check out. Community Clinics “Clinics Get Boost from Foundation,” Daniel Weintraub, in California Health Report, Mar. 16. In this blog, part of HealthyCal.org (a nonprofit journalism project funded by the California Endowment), Weintraub writes about the recent $7 million that the... Read the rest of this entry »