This post marks the final time that “Ending Health Disparities: What Works?” will run as a monthly column. In the weeks to come, we're excited to be transitioning to more frequent posts, more robust resources and tools, and a new look.

The AAPA has made some changes in governance structure; one of these changes is the debut of the new AAPA Health Disparities Work Group (HDWG). This blog will become an ongoing project of the HDWG, with a new post from an HDWG member each week. We'll continue to provide frequent updates and news from the health disparities and health equity arena. Additionally, we hope to provide value and support to state individuals, chapters, caucuses, specialty organizations, and colleagues inside and outside of the AAPA who share our commitment to identifying health inequities and then eliminating them.

In the meantime, we hope you'll continue to follow related activities on Twitter at @EquityPA. We're here to be a resource for you. Please feel free to share related developments or information with us at j.eddy.anderson@gmail.com.

So until November 1 when the new blog format debuts, here are a few interesting tidbits:

From the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's monthly “Quality/Equality” newsletter comes an interesting story from a Wall Street Journal blog entry about the challenges facing hospitals that are financially dinged for the high rate of Medicare readmissions. The blog author notes that hospitals are “are scrambling to improve discharge planning and follow-up in the face of pending Medicare payment reductions for preventable readmissions.” It'd be interesting to know what the readmit rates are like for non-Medicare patients, look at how those processes vary related to race and other identifiable cultural factors, and learn why it takes financial disincentives to drive such quality and equality improvement activity.

Sometimes studies reach such obvious conclusions that it's hard to not just snicker and say “duh.” One such Johns Hopkins study, recently published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, concluded that psychological stress due to racial discrimination can cause heart disease. While at first blush this might seem like something we already intuitively know, this study carves out some new ground, looking at levels of oxidative stress using degradation of red blood cells as a measure. UPI.com quoted researchers describing this process:

"This is a preliminary report of an association between racial discrimination and oxidative stress. It is a first step to understanding whether there is a relationship between the two," the researchers concluded. "Our findings suggest that there may be identifiable cellular pathways by which racial discrimination amplifies cardiovascular and other age-related disease risks. If increased red blood cell oxidative stress is associated with experiencing racial discrimination in African Americans, this could be one reason that many age-associated chronic diseases have a higher prevalence in this group."

Novel research such as this will prove to be invaluable in pinpointing and describing social determinants of health inequality.