March is National Nutrition Month, so we talked to one of our investigators who works in that area. Meet Jason Block, MD, MPH!
A graduate of Tulane University School of Medicine and School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Dr. Block is a clinician and researcher whose primary research interests are neighborhood-level determinants of weight gain and obesity, the evaluation of governmental and institutional policies and other novel interventions to improve diet, and leveraging electronic health record data for observational research and public health surveillance.
In the health care world, financial toxicity is defined as direct harm that occurs when patients must pay out-of-pocket for substantial shares of health care services. But what about the harms patients can’t see – wasteful spending that indirectly drains the resources of families through increased health insurance premiums and taxes? That, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute Associate Professors Frank Wharam, Anita Wagner, and Duke University colleague Peter Ubel say, is financial pollution.