The Health Disparities Podcast

Are rural health disparities being widened by bundled payments? Featuring Donna Kurek.

When healthcare quality management expert Donna Kurek made the switch to a more rural hospital system, she realized that there exists a whole different set of social determinants to consider in Appalachia, especially in the context of bundled payments.

Physician Assistants have an increasingly important role in healthcare. Featuring Klarisse Mathis.

Physician Assistants are a relatively new specialty created in response to the shortage of primary care physicians in rural areas, and the PA profession is now well established with over 100,000 graduates of accredited PA programs.

Safety net hospitals are crucial, but closures are making healthcare less universal. Featuring Dr. Eric Santos.

Orthopedist Dr. Eric Santos sees a diverse range of patients in his two Texas practices in Corpus Christi and McAllen, which have very different patient populations. He works hard to provide culturally competent healthcare services to his Hispanic patients, which includes providing consultations in both Spanish and English.

How Nurse Practitioners drive health equity through vital rural and frontier healthcare. With Wesley Davis and Cristina Gonzalez.

Rural Wyoming is a beautiful place to live, but those wide-open spaces on the frontier create a number of health disparities, with the presence of Native American reservations, COVID-19, and hospital closures adding more complexity.

Peggy’s Story: Operation Change, South Side, Chicago.

Operation Change is a community intervention designed to address chronic health conditions and to mitigate some of the related social determinants of health, for women in mid-life and later-life. A fundamental part of the program is to help participants find their own sources of motivation for creating a healthier lifestyle.

Lynn’s story: a new outlook on life from new knowledge gained – and her fitness tracker.

Operation Change provided Lynn with invaluable knowledge and a new support network. In her 70s and busy in retirement with volunteer work, Lynn became more conscious of her diet, her physical activity levels, and she became a FitBit enthusiast.

Ovidia’s story: Learning about health disparities motivated her to make changes.

Mt. Vernon, N.Y. resident Olivia found new motivation to take care of her own health by learning about health disparities in her community.

Latinx clinical research inclusion: how Dr Fabian Sandoval and Dr Gustavo Corrales teamed up to move the needle.

Bringing clinical research to Latinx communities has become a joint mission for today’s podcast guests, Dr Fabian Sandoval and Dr Gustavo Corrales.

Understanding mistrust of flu and COVID-19 vaccines, featuring Dr. Sandra Crouse Quinn.

The relatively low uptake of flu vaccinations in Black and Hispanic communities is a longstanding health disparity and a public health concern. What if this pattern is repeated for the coronavirus, which is already having a disparate impact?

Freda’s Story: Freda needed accountability to help decrease her pain and reduce her A1C. Being part of a team was the key.

Meet Freda from St. Louis. Over many sedentary years Freda experienced chronic conditions such as back pain, diabetes and high blood pressure and she found it difficult to follow her doctor’s directions to exercise and lose weight. “I desperately needed to garner better health habits, or I would have deterioration in my conditions and need […]