Stanford Health Policy

Stanford Health Policy A community of faculty, researchers & students working to improve health of people around the world.

Innovation, discovery, and education to improve health policy. Stanford Health Policy is a collaboration among health policy experts across the Stanford campus, focusing on research from the Center for Health Policy/ Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (CHP/PCOR) and the Department of Health Research and Policy (HRP). Our mission is to improve health through better health policy. We acco

mplish our mission through innovative, interdisciplinary research and training. Stanford Health Policy is comprised of research groups within the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford University School of Medicine. FSI is a university-wide research and education institution at Stanford devoted to understanding the problems, policies, and processes that cross international borders and affect lives around the world. The School of Medicine (SOM) has long been a leader in biomedical innovation, research, and health care. Our affiliation with both FSI and the SOM provides access to a wide range of researchers who span the social sciences, engineering, and medicine — from pediatrics to geriatrics, law, economics and decision science.

As global temperatures climb, a growing number of older adults are facing a point where their bodies simply can’t keep u...
08/25/2026

As global temperatures climb, a growing number of older adults are facing a point where their bodies simply can’t keep up, a state that physiologists call “uncompensable heat stress.” This is when sweating and other biological cooling mechanisms are overwhelmed and core body temperature keeps rising unchecked.

Previous projections have applied heat limits for healthy young adults to all age groups, overlooking the greater vulnerability in people 65 years and older. But with the world’s population aging rapidly – due to longer life expectancies and falling fertility rates – this could seriously underestimate future heat risks for elderly people.

A new study published in The Lancet Planetary Health by Stanford Health Policy (SHP) researchers Qinqin Kong, PhD, and Eran Bendavid, MD, MS, asks the question: if you factor in how age affects heat tolerance, how much does that change predictions of who’s at risk of heat-related illness and death?

A global analysis finds that aging populations may face intolerable heat more often, in more places, and for longer than previous estimates showed.

When you wolf down a Whopper or binge a Netflix series, you probably don't think about the long-term health consequences...
08/25/2026

When you wolf down a Whopper or binge a Netflix series, you probably don't think about the long-term health consequences—or who ultimately pays for them.

But SHP’s Sara Singer does. A new study published in the American Journal of Health Promotion by Singer, PhD, MBA, and colleagues at Building H calculates the hidden health costs companies create when their products affect our eating, movement, and lifestyle.

The results were striking.

Stanford Health Policy is a joint effort of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford School of Medicine

Americans pay more for health care than any other nation, but few know that the system's current model reflects nearly a...
08/25/2026

Americans pay more for health care than any other nation, but few know that the system's current model reflects nearly a century of PR campaigns and competing interests.

SHP’s Marcella Alsan, MD, PhD, MPH, joins host Maxwell Dorey on his podcast, Marginal Babble, to examine how today's private health-care system was built through a coordinated campaign by the American Medical Association (AMA) and PR firms like Whitaker & Baxter, which transformed a voluntary, doctor-led prepayment model into the foundation of the modern industry.

Americans are paying more for healthcare than almost any other nati...

SHP’s Michelle Mello, JD, PhD, joins Chip Kahn on KFF’s podcast The Business of Health podcast to talk about how artific...
07/21/2026

SHP’s Michelle Mello, JD, PhD, joins Chip Kahn on KFF’s podcast The Business of Health podcast to talk about how artificial intelligence is transforming everyday medicine. Mello, a professor of health policy and of law, is co-leader of Stanford Medicine’s Healthcare Ethical Assessment Lab for AI, and one of the country’s leading experts on patient safety and accountability in medicine.

In this conversation, Mello and Kahn addresses the key questions about the rapidly expanding use of AI in medicine: who makes the rules, who ensures the technology gets it right—and who answers when it doesn't?

AI is racing into everyday medicine. The rules of the road are stil...

The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence announced the launch of the AI and Organizations Lab, ...
07/20/2026

The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence announced the launch of the AI and Organizations Lab, a new research center that will establish an empirical science of how AI transforms workplace coordination and organizational performance. The lab advances the institute’s mission of human-centered AI by examining how AI impacts jobs, reshapes team dynamics, and influences organizational outcomes. Its goal is to ensure artificial intelligence enhances rather than diminishes human capabilities while generating positive societal impacts.

"The AI+Organizations Lab will inform policy decisions by generating research grounded in real-world practice," said Sara Singer, PhD, MBA, a professor of health policy and medicine at Stanford School of Medicine and professor of organizational behavior, by courtesy, at Stanford GSB—and one of four core faculty members leading the new lab.

Stanford Health Policy is a joint effort of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford School of Medicine

Two Stanford Health Policy PhD students claim top honors at the annual Society For Medical Decision Making - SMDM confer...
07/20/2026

Two Stanford Health Policy PhD students claim top honors at the annual Society For Medical Decision Making - SMDM conference, each earning a Lee B. Lusted Student Prize for outstanding poster presentations.

Eliza Ennis, a PhD Candidate in decision sciences, earned the Milt Weinstein Award for Outstanding Presentation in Applied Health Economics. Her poster highlighted her research into the impact of contraceptive access on birth outcomes in Colombia.

Hannah Thomas, MD, MS, took home the Bruce Schackman Award for Outstanding Presentation in Health Services, Outcomes, and Policy Research. The urology resident and Health Policy PhD student, presented a poster: Dynamic workforce modeling to inform surgical capacity planning in low-resource settings.

Stanford Health Policy is a joint effort of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford School of Medicine

Michelle Mello, professor of law and of health policy, joins Stanford Medicine podcast, the Future of Medicine, for a co...
07/20/2026

Michelle Mello, professor of law and of health policy, joins Stanford Medicine podcast, the Future of Medicine, for a conversation about one of the most frustrating and consequential parts of American healthcare: prior authorization.

Dr. Michelle Mello, professor of law and health policy at Stanford ...

The American College of Physicians (ACP) notes 68.5% of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, chronic conditions that inc...
07/20/2026

The American College of Physicians (ACP) notes 68.5% of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, chronic conditions that increase the risk of serious health problems including type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and some cancers. So the organization published new recommendations in the Annals of Internal Medicine to help tackle overweight and obesity with medications—including GLP-1s.

“The new guideline provides evidence-based recommendations to help people who have overweight and obesity understand the benefits and harms of pharmacologic treatment,” says Douglas K. Owens, MD, MS, chair of the Department of Health Policy and a member of the ACP committee that produced the new guideline.

Stanford Health Policy is a joint effort of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford School of Medicine

For over 25 years, Stanford’s Kimberly Babiarz has felt fiercely devoted to addressing the complex injustice of human tr...
07/20/2026

For over 25 years, Stanford’s Kimberly Babiarz has felt fiercely devoted to addressing the complex injustice of human trafficking, a crime she is quick to point out, “is everywhere.”

Modern slavery, which includes s*x and labor trafficking, forced labor, domestic servitude, debt bo***ge, and forced marriage, is “a big, systemic problem in need of big, systemic solutions,” she notes.

Those kinds of solutions typically require a diverse array of skillsets and experience – not to mention a great deal of dedication to the work, both of which Babiarz found when she and longtime collaborator Grant Miller, Henry J. Kaiser, Jr. Professor in the Department of Health Policy at Stanford School of Medicine, linked up with Jessie Brunner of Stanford’s Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatrics Vicki Ward, and Luis Assis, labor prosecutor and Chief Data Scientist at Brazil’s Federal Labor Prosecution Office.

The group coalesced around a shared sense of frustration at the lack of an evidence base undergirding decades of anti-trafficking interventions and the Stanford Human Trafficking Data Lab was born in 2019 with a mission to bring data and evidence to the fight against human trafficking.

Stanford Health Policy is a joint effort of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford School of Medicine

The 2026 Rosenkranz Prize winner is tackling a tropical disease most people have never heard of—yet it infects some 300-...
07/20/2026

The 2026 Rosenkranz Prize winner is tackling a tropical disease most people have never heard of—yet it infects some 300-600 million people worldwide.

Strongyloidiasis, caused by a microscopic parasitic roundworm, mostly impacts people in low- to middle-income countries in Africa, Southeast Asia, and South and Central America. While it typically causes mild symptoms such abdominal pain, diarrhea, hives—the Strongyloides stercoralis parasite can be a ticking time bomb and can rapidly replicate in infected people who become immunosuppressed, leading to disseminated disease that has more than a 60% fatality rate.

Stanford Health Policy is a joint effort of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford School of Medicine

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