Department of Health Policy

A Vanderbilt University Medical Center study published this week in JAMA shows that patients already at higher risk for gastrointestinal bleeding gain a marked protection from this risk when they take a proton pump inhibitor (PPI) in combination with an oral anticoagulant.

Precision medicine research — which involves the consolidation of massive amounts of complex data and the widespread sharing of those data for a variety of research studies — offers the prospect of both benefit and harm.

The Incoming class of elected officials will encounter a variety of outstanding — yet often overlooked — health care policy questions that will impact health and providers across Tennessee.

Reining in the nation’s opioid epidemic will require diverse and innovative strategies ranging from drug discovery to “policy translation,” according to speakers at a recent Vanderbilt Faculty Cutting-edge Discovery Lecture.

Katherine Swartz, PhD, a nationally known leader in health policy research, encouraged others conducting investigations in the field to move beyond the data and into local communities to gather the stories behind the data during last week’s Research into Policy and Practice Lecture hosted by Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Department of Health Policy.

While there has been much effort to control spending for individuals eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare in the United States, for the first time a team of Vanderbilt health policy researchers have analyzed spending trends for this population over a multiyear period in order to gain a much clearer understanding of exactly how much is being spent and by whom.

As both drug prices and out-of-pocket expense for prescription medications continue to climb, a team of Health Policy experts at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine (VUSM) have received a grant to determine if these factors are causing older Americans enrolled in Medicare Part D for medication coverage to delay or never fill their prescriptions.