Francis K. Amankwah – författare

Throughout history, perhaps no other disease has generated the level of social, scientific, and political discourse or has had the degree of cultural significance as cancer. A collective in the truest sense of the word, "cancer" is a clustering of different diseases that afflict individuals in different ways. Its burdens are equally broad and diverse, from the physical, financial, and psychological tolls it imposes on individuals to the costs it inflicts upon the nation''s clinical care and public health systems, and despite decades of concerted efforts often referred to as the "war on cancer", those costs have only continued to grow over time. The causes and effects of cancer are complex—in part preventable and treatable, but also in part unknown, and perhaps even unknowable.

Guiding Cancer Control defines the key principles, attributes, methods, and tools needed to achieve the goal of implementing an effective national cancer control plan. This report describes the current structure of cancer control from a local to global scale, identifies necessary goals for the system, and formulates the path towards integrated disease control systems and a cancer-free future. This framework is a crucial step in establishing an effective, efficient, and accountable system for controlling cancer and other diseases.

To explore the role of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in innovative drug development and its impact on patient access, the Board on Health Care Services and the Board on Health Sciences Policy of the National Academies jointly hosted a public workshop on July 24–25, 2019, in Washington, DC. Workshop speakers and participants discussed the ways in which federal investments in biomedical research are translated into innovative therapies and considered approaches to ensure that the public has affordable access to the resulting new drugs. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

Every year, significant amounts of expensive drugs are discarded. This is due in part to the growing number of prescription drugs that are administered in variable doses (rather than fixed or flat doses) based on a patient''s weight or body size. Strict regulations and guidance generally prohibit or severely restrict the acceptable time frame for sharing medication from single-dose vials among patients, and so the unused amount will typically be discarded. Due to the current system for producing, administering, and paying for drugs in the United States, significant - but indeterminate - amounts of expensive prescription drugs are discarded each year.

At the request of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Medications in Single Dose Vials: Implications of Discarded Drugs explores the federal health care costs, safety, and quality concerns associated with discarded drugs that result from the weight-based dosing of medicines contained in single-dose vials.

Emerging real-time data sources, together with innovative data science techniques and methods - including artificial intelligence and machine learning - can help inform upstream suicide prevention efforts. Select social media platforms have proactively deployed these methods to identify individual platform users at high risk for suicide, and in some cases may activate local law enforcement, if needed, to prevent imminent suicide. To explore the current scope of activities, benefits, and risks of leveraging innovative data science techniques to help inform upstream suicide prevention at the individual and population level, the Forum on Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a virtual workshop series consisting of three webinars held on April 28, May 12, and June 30, 2022. This Proceedings highlights presentations and discussions from the workshop.

A National Academies committee hosted a public workshop series in 2023. Speakers invited by the committee discussed the current state of racial and ethnic health care disparities in the U.S., highlighted major drivers of health care disparities, provided insight into successful and unsuccessful interventions, identified gaps in the evidence base and proposed strategies to close those gaps, and considered ways to scale and spread effective interventions to reduce racial and ethnic inequities in health care. This workshop series is part of an ongoing consensus study examining the current state of racial and ethnic health care disparities in the U.S., building on the 2003 Institute of Medicine consensus report, Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. The consensus study will publish its full conclusions and recommendations in summer 2024.

Racial and ethnic inequities in health and health care impact individual well-being, contribute to millions of premature deaths, and cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Addressing these inequities is vital to improving the health of the nation''s most disadvantaged communities—and will also help to achieve optimal health for all. In 2003, the Institute of Medicine examined these inequities in Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care.

Because disparities persist, the National Academies convened an expert committee with support from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the National Institutes of Health. The committee''s report reviews the major drivers of health care disparities, provides insight into successful and unsuccessful interventions, identifies gaps in the evidence base, and makes recommendations to advance health equity.