Digital Commons Network^™

Diagnosing Death: Why Does It Remain "Well Settled And Persistently Unresolved"?, Melissa M. Goldstein

Health Policy and Management Faculty Publications

For ten days after Motl Brody had been declared dead by physicians, the 12-year-old boy lay in an intensive-care unit of Children's National Medical Center, sustained by drugs and a ventilator. His Orthodox Jewish parents insisted that, according to religious law, Motl remained alive because his heart continued to beat. District of Columbia law said he did not.

Although statutes on the books of every U.S. state allow a determination of death when all functions of the brain, including the brain stem, have irreversibly ceased, there is continued debate, especially in religious, philosophical, and bioethics contexts, about how, or even …

Ready Or Not? Protecting The Public's Health From Diseases, Disasters, And Bioterrorism, Jeffrey Levi, Serena Vinter, Rebecca St. Laurent, Laura M. Segal

Health Policy and Management Faculty Publications

While significant progress has been made to better protect the country from health emergencies, funding for essential programs has been cut, putting these improvements in jeopardy. Additionally, a number of critical areas of preparedness still have significant gaps, including surge capacity and biosurveillance systems, and these problems are less likely to be addressed as funding decreases.

Monitoring And Assessing The Use Of External Quality Review Organizations To Improve Services For Young Children: A Toolkit For State Medicaid Agencies, Tara Krissik, Henry T. Ireys, Anne R. Markus, Sara J. Rosenbaum

Health Policy and Management Faculty Publications

Federal regulations encourage state Medicaid agencies to use external quality review organizations (EQROs) to help implement strategies for assessing and improving the quality of medical services provided to beneficiaries enrolled in managed care plans. However, many states have not availed themselves of this opportunity and may lack guidance on how to do so. This report provides agencies with specifications for developing a scope of work that will lead to conceptually and methodologically sound studies of the quality of preventive and developmental services for young children enrolled in Medicaid. Among other recommendations, the authors note that states may require EQROs to …

Baseline Evaluation Of The Dc Emergency Healthcare Coalition, Melissa A. Higdon, Peter Shin, Michael A. Stoto

Health Policy and Management Faculty Publications

The DC Healthcare Facilities Emergency Care Coalition, funded by a grant by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), was designed to significantly improve the state of emergency preparedness in health care facilities in the District of Columbia (DC), and to create a model for emergency preparedness that can be used by other large cities or regions of care across the nation. Its goal is to provide a comprehensive, uniform, and consistent framework and infrastructure for emergency preparedness across the full continuum of patient care. Devised to address the inconsistencies, shortcomings, fragmentations, …

Harnessing Knowledge To Ensure Food Safety: Opportunities To Improve The Nation's Food Safety Information Infrastructure, Michael R. Taylor, Michael B. Batz

Health Policy and Management Faculty Publications

Those working in the food industry face an abundance of information generated by diverse institutions and individuals.

Ensuring the safety of food is critically important to the public's health and a challenge for policy-makers seeking to enhance the government's role in this arena. Although the food industry has an inherent duty to make food safe, the effectiveness of what they do is highly dependent on the quality of the information they receive on potential hazards and good practices.

In this context, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded a project under the auspices of the Food Safety Research Consortium to examine …

Building A High-Quality Language Services Program Toolkit, Jennifer Trott, Catherine West, Priti Shah, Marsha Regenstein

Health Policy and Management Faculty Publications

Ten hospitals with racially and ethnically diverse patient populations participated in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's "Speaking Together: National Language Services Network," a program aimed at improving the quality and availability of health care language services for patients with limited English proficiency (LEP). This toolkit provides advice to hospitals on improving quality and accessibility of language services.