Those in the field work to improve the health of the public by studying the medical, economic, political, and social issues that affect how health care is funded, managed, and delivered in the US. Topics range from the benefits -- and ethics -- of paying people to quit smoking to national health care reform to public policy on euthanasia.  At Penn practitioners span the disciplinary gamut and include experts from medicine, law, nursing, business, education, philosophy, psychology, sociology, religious studies, and public policy.

Recently two of the major institutional homes of health policy research at Penn, the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy in the Perelman School of Medicine, hosted an all-day retreat to identify priorities for future work and promote even more cross-departmental collaboration.

Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD, the new chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy and former chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, moderated a wide-ranging discussion of topic areas that could have a major impact on health policy and also spur creative alliances on health policy research across the Penn campus. More than 80 attendees took part in the exchange of ideas and produced a spectrum of suggestions, from which they chose the most promising for further exploration.

Priorities that emerged include improving care to low-income people, involving patients more in their own health and health care (including using the new media and social networking), comparing health policies and treatments to identify those that work best, developing better models to project supply and demand for health professionals, expanding health insurance coverage, and modernizing Medicare.

“Penn has an amazing pool of talent in the sphere of health policy,” said Emanuel. “One of the reasons I came here was the opportunity to work with so many leaders in the field. I’m very encouraged about the momentum that developed at the retreat and am excited about the fresh ways of thinking Penn will be bringing to the policy arena.”