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June 10, 2011
Promoting Wellness, Health and Aetna Foundation Developer Challenge Launched The Aetna Foundation, in partnership with Health 2.0, has issued a Developer Challenge to solicit new interactive browser-based applications designed to make important federal data about obesity and related data sets more accessible and usable for health services researchers, public health officials, policy makers and other leaders in the fight against obesity. The Foundation will award a total of $50,000 in prize money to the top three applications. Aetna Foundation President Anne C. Beal, MD, MPH announced the Developer Challenge at the Health Data Initiative Forum at the Institute of Medicine meeting on Thursday, June 9. Learn more in our news release. Annual Giving Report Now Online Our 2010 Annual Giving Report is now available for viewing online at the Aetna Foundation website. Called Investing in Our Future, the multi-media presentation features an overview of 2010 grant making by Aetna and the Aetna Foundation, with special sections on the Aetna Foundation's three primary focus areas – Obesity, Racial and Ethnic Health Care Equity and Integrated Health Care – plus special sections on Leaders of Tomorrow, the Foundation's effort to diversify the health care professions, and Supporting Employee Involvement. Four 2010 grant recipients are profiled in video stories: The Dance Theatre of Harlem, the March of Dimes, the University of California, San Francisco and a participant in the AcademyHealth/Aetna Foundation Minority Scholars Program. The Annual Giving Report also showcases employee volunteer activities in a slide show of more than a dozen volunteer efforts from around the country. In 2010, Aetna and the Aetna Foundation awarded $15.6 million in grants and sponsorships. Grant Recipient's Paper Published in Peer-Reviewed Journal The results of an Aetna Foundation-funded study on potential misinterpretations of unadjusted health care disparities data was published in the May 23 edition of The American Journal of Medical Quality. The paper, entitled The Implications of Using Adjusted Versus Unadjusted Methods to Measure Health Care Disparities at the Practice Level, was authored by Muriel Jean-Jacques, Stephen D. Persell, Romana Hasnain-Wynia, Jason A. Thompson and David W. Baker. The authors found that many of the initially apparent racial differences were in large part the result of differences in gender, socioeconomic status, type of health insurance or number of chronic conditions, rather than race. One of the most significant findings in the study was that the largest disparity observed was not by race or socioeconomic status but gender, particularly in the area of cardiovascular disease control and prevention. The study's authors urge health care organizations seeking to address health outcome disparities to base reform efforts on adjusted data, rather than unadjusted data, to ensure the most effective results and the most efficient use of limited resources. Increasingly, health care organizations, in response to federal legislation and spiraling costs, are striving to minimize disparities to improve the overall quality of care provided.
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