In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States is finally experiencing a cultural shift in consciousness and awareness of racial disparities. And meanwhile, the maternal health community’s reckoning with racism is accelerating. Black women in the United States die from pregnancy-related complications at

In 1965, Harvard Medical School (HMS) had a thriving Family Medicine & Primary Care Residency—a visionary program that was strongly rooted in serving the vulnerable populations surrounding the HMS campus. Resident physicians trained to provide outpatient primary care across the life spectrum, working in partnership with Boston Children’s Hospital, Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, and Boston Lying-In Hospital (the latter two of which are Brigham & Women’s predecessor institutions). ...

On March 18, 2020, Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) opened its COVID-19 outpatient clinic (now referred to as the acute care clinic), with the goal to triage and provide care for patients with respiratory symptoms, ultimately reducing strain on our local emergency departments. CHA is an academic community healthcare system based in the Boston area and serves ...

If you ask a patient to describe their experience finding a therapist or psychiatrist in the community, don’t be surprised if ‘expensive,’ ‘difficult,’ and ‘discouraging’ are some of the first words that come to mind. The decades-long separation of mental healthcare from physical health has left patients and clinicians alike with serious challenges navigating options for care. And the cost has been much more than just inconvenience—our poorly integrated system is responsible for

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to be felt across the United States, and this includes the ways in which we interact with the healthcare system. As the mother of a daughter with complex medical needs and a diabetic patient myself—what many would refer to as “super-users” of the medical system—we had to quickly adjust and adapt to the ways we’d need to manage our health conditions throughout the pandemic, as COVID has not stopped our need for ongoing care management. So, when I was asked to serve as faculty for the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the systemic limitations of the American health system when confronted with the unexpected emergence of major disease, and underserved communities are often those most affected. A possible solution to address these disparities: mobile clinics. Mobile clinics are vehicles customized with medical equipment and staffed with medical providers and other health ...

Addiction is a chronic medical condition that carries significantly elevated risk of morbidity and mortality, as the sequelae of substance use disorders (SUD) can be severe and life-altering. While evidence-based treatments for SUD exist, many people face barriers to accessing care. For example, of the approximately 20 million people living with addiction in the United States in 2019, only 12.2% received ...

Meet Anna. She’s a 47-year-old woman with diabetes and high blood pressure—that is, hypertension. When I first met Anna three years ago, she’d recently moved to Massachusetts and obtained health insurance for the first time in two decades. During her first clinic visit, Anna’s blood sugar was wildly uncontrolled—a clear indication of diabetes. She felt dizzy and fatigued, but this was her baseline. We spent over an hour, during a visit scheduled for 20 minutes, working with the pharmacist and health insurance company to find an insulin prescription for which she could ...

More than six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, child care solutions for families remain scarce. A high-stakes problem typically confined to parents with children younger than five, lack of child care has now become a near-universal challenge, with remote K-12 learning upending care infrastructure for families with school-aged children as well. Consistent failure to provide public funding to the child care and early education sector—both traditionally and in this moment of crisis—is taking a heavy toll: