HIV programs in lower-income countries have provided lifesaving care and treatment to millions of people, but their expansion has raised concerns that these programs may have diverted health workers, management attention, and infrastructure investments from other health priorities, such as high maternal mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. We assessed the effect of HIV programs supported by the Pre...

OBJECTIVE To critically review the advantages and disadvantages of selective versus comprehensive Primary Health Care (PHC) approaches as a strategy towards improving health in the developing world. DATA SOURCES Review of literature on PHC. DATA SELECTION Relevant papers from western and developing world literature. DATA EXTRACTION Search of Pub-Med, WHO/UNICEF reports, and relevant publi...

Background As Michael McCally notes in Life Support: The Environment and Human Health, “it is at least since the time of Hippocrates’s essay Air, Water, and Places that humans have been aware of the many connections between health and the environment.” Despite this awareness, seldom do we create an environment optimal for achieving health and wellbeing. A vital part of an environment which is s...

Background & objectives: Vaccination coverage in India is far from complete despite the commitment to universal coverage. In this study, we examine the role of health infrastructure in expanding immunization coverage in rural India. Our approach differs from prior work in that we include detailed measures of village health infrastructure that account for the wide variations in health care capab...

This article introduces the Community Health Applied Research Network (CHARN), a practice-based research network of community health centers (CHCs). Established by the Health Resources and Services Administration in 2010, CHARN is a network of 4 community research nodes, each with multiple affiliated CHCs and an academic center. The four nodes (18 individual CHCs and 4 academic partners in 9 st...

The World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) World Health Report 2010, “Health systems financing, the path to universal coverage,” promoted universal health coverage (UHC) as an aspirational objective for country health systems. Yet, in addition to the dimensions of services and coverage, distribution of coverage in the population, and financial risk protection highlighted by the report, the conside...

State, federal, and private agencies are exploring and investing in new health care delivery models--including nearly $300 million awarded to states to support State Innovation Models (SIM), multi-payer payment and care delivery transformation initiatives. Successful care delivery transformation efforts hinge on provider and payer access to reliable and comprehensive data through robust quality...

We examined the relationship between race-specific rural mortality and the health infrastructure of rural counties in light of America's recent emergence of a rural mortality penalty. Using the Compressed Mortality File from National Center for Health Statistics (2008-2012) and county-level demographic, socioeconomic, and health care indicators from the Area Health Resource File and the US Cens...