Research revealed that millions of used bars of soap from hotels worldwide are sent to landfills every day while many people in developing nations are dying from illnesses that could be prevented with access to simple hygiene products. One non-profit, Clean the World, is changing all of that. Health Policy Professor Dr. William Schaffner is quoted.

Sten Vermund, M.D., Ph.D., has been named assistant vice chancellor for Global Health in recognition of the growing importance of globalization to Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s research, teaching and patient care missions. Vermund, the Amos Christie Professor of Global Health, directs the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health, and is professor in the Department of Pediatrics. He is known internationally for his leadership of projects aimed at HIV/AIDS prevention, care and treatment, HPV/cervix cancer prevention, and on maternal and child health in low resource regions.

  On March 30, 2015, the Department of Health Policy hosted its second Research into Policy and Practice Lecture, “Politics & Policy: Can they live together?” in collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at Meharry Medical College.  The distinguished panelists included the Honorable Phil Bredesen, former governor of Tennessee, and Jeffrey Selberg, the Executive Director of the Peterson Center on Healthcare. 

Abstract: There is widespread agreement that the US healthcare system wastes as much as 5% of GDP, yet little consensus on what care is actually unproductive. This partly arises because of the endogeneity of patient choice of treatment location. This paper uses the effective random assignment of patients to ambulance companies to generate comparisons across similar patients treated at different hospitals.

Hospitals that discharge patients to expensive skilled nursing facilities are raising costs and reducing care quality, write John Graves, assistant professor of health policy, and MIT researchers Joseph Doyle and Jonathan Gruber.