MAY 2022
Director's Note
At IHPS, we aim for our work to contribute to ensuring that each and every person has access to sustainable, high-quality, affordable health care. What defines “high quality”? Each person has their own preferences and goals, and thus patient-centered care is a core component of this vision. This month’s News highlights our work in this area, including the award-winning Patient Support Corps, overarching research on patient safety, and specific research on patient goals and outcomes for birth, pediatrics, rheumatology, drug safety, and Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia. Identifying the best approaches to meeting each individual’s needs can be time-intensive but is essential to address widening racial disparities in outcomes and place patient autonomy at the center of care.

Joanne Spetz
IHPS Focus On:
Patient Experience and Quality of Care

Many IHPS faculty are working on policy related to patient experience and quality of care. Naomi Bardach, MD is looking at improving pediatric quality of care through mobile reporting tools and quality improvement collectives. Jeff Belkora, PhD leads the award-winning Patient Support Corps to guide patients through breast cancer diagnoses. Alissa Bernstein Sideman, PhD, MPH, MA focuses on improving quality of care for dementia patients being primarily served by primary care providers in safety-net settings. Sarah Garrett, PhD works to integrate the experiences of clinicians and Black birthing people into state mandated regulations for antiracism training for providers. Rosa Rodriguez-Monguio, PhD, MS is Director of UCSF's Medication Outcomes Center and her work focuses on patient safety and quality in pharmacy. Gabriela Schmajuk, MD is using health IT to improve quality of care in rheumatology. Learn more about IHPS's current work in patient experience and quality of care.

Upcoming Events
IHPS "How to Impact Policy Change" Series
June 8, 2022
12 - 1 pm PT
Partnering with Legal Experts in Policy and Advocacy


Megha Garg, MD (l) - UCSF
Sarah Hooper, JD (r) - UC Hastings
Co-Directors UCSF-UC Hastings Consortium on Health, Policy and Law

Webinar link here
Full Spring 2022 Webinar topics here
IHPS Health Policy Grand Rounds
June 15, 2022
12 - 1 pm PT
No Equity Without Data Equity

Ninez Ponce, PhD
Director, Center for Health Policy
University of California, Los Angeles

Webinar link here
2022 UCSF-Kaiser Family Foundation Fellows
IHPS established a yearlong health policy research fellowship for medical students in cooperation with the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). The Kaiser Family Foundation is a leading national health policy organization which conducts and disseminates health policy research findings to inform health policy decision-making. As a part of the fellowship, students are embedded within projects underway or planned at the Kaiser Family Foundation. They are co-mentored by Kaiser Family Foundation staff and UCSF faculty members. Congratulations to the next cohort of UCSF-KFF Fellows!
Tatyana Roberts

Tatyana is a medical student at UCSF. She holds a B.S. in Biological Sciences from Cornell University. After Cornell, Tatyana obtained her MPH in Health and Social Behavior from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to starting medical school, she worked in undergraduate global health education at Cornell's Global Health Program. Her interest includes women's health and addiction medicine. Over the next year, Tatyana will be participating in the UCSF-KFF Health Policy Fellowship. She will be evaluating Medicaid coverage for postpartum and pregnant individuals with substance use disorder and will be working closely with KFF's Women's Health Policy team.
Hope Schwartz

Hope is an emergency medicine-bound UCSF medical student from Oakland, CA, with a background in health economics and hospital administration. She is passionate about health care affordability, value, and equity, as well as emergency department efficiency and operations. At KFF, she will work with Cynthia Cox and the Program on the ACA to evaluate the impact of the national No Surprises Act on health care consumers, emergency department billing and the health insurance marketplace. She plans to pursue a career at the intersection of clinical medicine and health policy to improve access to high value emergency care. 
Research Highlights

In a recent Journal of Health Economics article, Justin White, PhD and colleagues found that anti-tobacco programs in schools can help children in low-income countries from using tobacco. White and colleagues piloted a penalty-based smoking intervention that helped middle school students in Indonesia from using tobacco.


A fifth of men with mSUI report decisional regret regarding their initial incontinence management decision. Anne Suskind, MD, MS and Louise Walter, MD and colleagues detail decision making consequences among men in a recent Journal of Urology article. Depression and higher incontinence scores are associated with more regret, while SDM is associated with less. Recognition of depression, improved efforts at SDM and individualized treatment counseling have the potential to improve patient satisfaction with treatment choice. In addition, given the high level of regret among those electing conservative treatment, surgery may be underutilized in this population.

IHPS faculty are responding to policy challenges raised by the
COVID-19 pandemic with rapid-cycle research and technical assistance. A compilation of their work to date is available on a regularly updated webpage. 

One recent publication is by Cynthia Harper, PhD and colleagues, "Assessing differences in contraceptive provision through telemedicine among reproductive health providers during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States" published in Reproductive Health.  Read more about our work to address the COVID pandemic here.
IHPS Faculty Spotlight
Anil Makam, MD, MAS, is an academic hospital medicine physician and a health services researcher. His research is at the intersection of geriatrics, hospital medicine, and post-acute care, specifically focusing on the role of long-term acute care hospitals (LTACs). His research interest stemmed from his simple observation that Dallas had many LTACs whereas San Francisco had very few, yet he cared for similarly sick and frail hospitalized older adults in both places. His research is funded by an NIA GEMSSTAR grant (2016-2018) and an NIA K23 Career Development Award (2016-2021). Dr. Makam applies health services research and epidemiological methods using Medicare claims, EHR data, and prospective observational cohort data to examine predictors and variation in LTAC use, comparative effectiveness of the LTAC model of care versus alternative care settings, and patterns of recovery for older adults transferred to LTACs.
Media Mentions