Medicine and health are surprisingly separate. In the introduction to his 1963 master work on medical economics, Kenneth Arrow acknowledged that “the subject is the medical-care industry, not health.” In the 50 years that followed, researchers, policymakers, and public health professionals generated valuable and varied insights into health, impacting both behaviors and environments while addressing social determinants and demographic trends. Yet medical care has followed an even steeper upward trajectory, growing rapidly in scientific precision, public esteem, and technical sophistication.

As a result, the economic gap between the two domains has widened. The U.S. health care system spends almost $3 trillion annually. Preventive screening and early intervention bridge medical care and health, as do nutrition, behavioral health, aging, and a few other fields. But the money is overwhelmingly in medical care, particularly rescue care for those with acute illnesses or serious (and typically preventable) complications of chronic disease.

Despite existing federal and state law and regulation, new human subjects research (HSR) scandals involving “vulnerable” populations continue to surface. Although existing oversight mechanisms were enacted to ensure voluntary informed consent for participants and institutional review board (IRB) oversight of HSR, these laws and regulations do not provide any special oversight mechanisms or protections to ensure the ethical and safe inclusion of cognitively impaired adults. The absence of rules to ensure consistently ethical conduct of research involving adults who lack consent capacity may either lead to exploitation of this vulnerable population or the dearth of important research into the broad range of diseases that impair cognition. In other words, while some institutions and investigators are conducting research with this group without guidance, others are taking an extremely conservative approach and are excluding these individuals from research. Without safeguards that are adequate and robust but not overly burdensome, conducting research involving this population is ethically and legally challenging.

Obesity is the definitive epidemic of the modern era in the United States. Its well-documented public health impacts, especially related to children and adolescents, are horrific. Nearly one-third of American minors are overweight; over 50% of them are obese. Already, these kids suffer from multiple adverse physical and mental health conditions. Sadly, absent serious communal and individual interventions, their lives may be cut short compared to their own parents’ life expectancy. While recent surveillance suggests childhood obesity may be trending down slightly in some populations, public health experts remain concerned about the threat obesity poses to the health of America's youth.

The concurrent travesty underlying childhood obesity is the relative societal failure to slow and reverse its spread.

Research uses of human bodies maintained by mechanical ventilation after being declared dead by neurological criteria (“heart-beating cadavers”), were first published in the early 1980s with a renewed interest in research on the newly or nearly dead occurring in about last decade. While this type of research may take many different forms, recent technologic advances in genomic sequencing along with high hopes for genomic medicine, have inspired interest in genomic research with the newly dead. For example, the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) program through the National Institutes of Health aims to collect large numbers of diverse human tissues with the eventual goal of elucidating the genetic bases of common diseases through a better understanding of the relationship between genetic variation and gene expression.

Global health is by definition and necessity a collaborative field; one that requires diverse professionals to address the clinical, biological, social, and political factors that contribute to the health of communities, regions, and nations. For universities with global health programs, the interprofessional nature of global health presents both vast opportunities and distinct challenges. In addition to helping students develop mastery within their chosen fields, universities must also ensure that students learn to collaborate with other professionals to address complex global health needs. While much work has been done in recent years to define the field of global health and set forth discipline-specific competencies, less has been done in the area of interdisciplinary or interprofessional global health education. This gap in scholarship is troubling given the clear and well-acknowledged need for professionals across a broad spectrum of disciplines to take part in global health initiatives.

In June 2013, faculty from the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, along with students from the law school and several health professional schools at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, visited Malawi, in southeast Africa. While there, they met with faculty and students at the University of Malawi Chancellor College to discuss the possibility of establishing an ongoing collaboration between the two universities’ law schools. The starting point for our discussion was the potential establishment of a multi-professional, comparative health law clinic that would focus on serving individuals living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA). This goal would serve two objectives of the Law & Health Care Program (L&HCP) at Maryland: to increase interprofessional education (IPE) opportunities and to expose law students to more global health law issues. Establishing this clinic would also be consistent with two strategic objectives of the University of Malawi Faculty of Law: to establish links with other law schools providing clinical legal education, and to contribute to Malawi’s efforts to solve HIV/AIDS-related problems.

The discovery and development of new therapeutics has always been central to improving health worldwide. However, there is ongoing concern regarding the current state of medical innovation. Output from the pharmaceutical industry has been criticized for not being “transformative,” that is, offering substantial improvements in patient outcomes over existing therapeutics. While the cost of drug development continues to rise, breakthrough therapies remain elusive and one half of Phase 3 studies fail. Venture capital, a traditional source of funding for new breakthrough biomedical innovations, has decreased investment by 30% in the biotechnology and medical device sectors from 2007 to 2013. Stakeholders question whether the new drugs approved each year by the FDA —many criticized as marginal improvements over existing therapies — justify the enormous investment.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) using donated oocytes has proven to be an effective treatment option for many prospective parents struggling with infertility, and the usage of donated oocytes in assisted reproduction has increased markedly since the technique was first successfully used in 1984. Data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the use of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in the United States indicate that approximately 12% of all ART cycles in the country now use donated oocytes. The increased use of oocyte donation in the United States has prompted discussion regarding risks associated with the process and how best to ensure the safety of oocyte donors.

Physical risks associated with oocyte donation include bleeding, infection, ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome and a potential, although unconfirmed, increased risk of developing various forms of cancer, such as uterine, colon, breast, ovarian, and endometrial cancers.

Efforts to ensure greater transparency in the regulation of “drugs” (used here as a catch-all for pharmaceuticals, biologics, medical devices, and biomarker-based technologies such as genetic testing paired with a pharmaceutical or biologic) are well underway. For example, laws in the United States and Europe now require registration of most clinical trials beyond phase 1. Yet instances of avoidable harm to patients continue to arise. In response, calls for disclosure of clinical trial data in the form of “clinical study reports,” not just trial designs and basic results, are growing. In this paper, I argue that disclosure of clinical trial data is necessary but insufficient. Rather, the regulatory decisions that flow from those trial data —whether positive (i.e., product approvals) or negative (i.e., abandoned products, product refusals, and withdrawals) —should also be open to outside scrutiny provided they are final in nature.

In the United States the delivery of health care traditionally has been hierarchical and strictly controlled by physicians. Physicians typically provided patients with little information about their diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment plan; patients were expected to follow their physicians’ orders and ask no questions. Beginning in the 1970s, with the widespread adoption of the doctrine of informed consent to treatment, the physician-patient relationship began to be more collaborative, although the extent of the change has been subject to debate. At a minimum, physicians began to give patients more information and asked them to consent to recommended treatment, the therapeutic privilege to withhold information from patients lost support and eventually was repudiated, and physicians embraced — at least in theory — a more patient-centered conception of health care.

More recently, health care and health promotion activities have moved beyond clinical encounters and the strict confines of physician-patient interactions.

Encouraged by the financial incentives in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009 (HITECH Act), electronic health record (EHR) adoption is on the rise. According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in 2014, 78% of office-based physicians had adopted some type of EHR system, up from 18% in 2001. Implementation of EHRs able to support the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “meaningful use” requirements has also significantly increased since 2010. Such a growth in EHR adoption with the capacity to achieve “meaningful use” standards suggests that the goal of nationwide, interoperable health records is moving closer to a reality.

While movement toward a system-wide, interoperable EHR promises benefits of such an electronic information management tool, the risks related to patients’ privacy of their health information remains a concern.

In September 2010 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the nation's elite academic hospitals located in East Baltimore, Maryland, Paul Warren Pardus entered the facility to visit his mother, a patient. During a discussion with her doctor in a hospital hallway, Pardus became “overwhelmed” about the care and condition of his mother, pulled a handgun from his waistband, and shot the doctor in the chest. Pardus then locked himself and his mother in her room, shot and killed her, and committed suicide.

Dr. Gabe Kelen, a national expert on emergency preparedness and director of the Johns Hopkins emergency department, admitted several years later that this tragic event “really got us thinking in a very serious way.” Together with colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response (CEPAR), Kelen conducted research on the threat and impact of “active shooters” in health care settings.

From their relative obscurity over the past three decades, varied strains of Ebola disease have emerged as a substantial global biothreat. The current outbreak of Ebola, beginning in March 2014 in Guinea, is projected to infect tens of thousands of people before being brought under control. Some estimate the outbreak could exceed 100,000 cases and extend another 12-18 months. Ebola’s spread has the potential to extend across the globe, but is concentrated in several African countries (e.g., Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Nigeria, and Senegal). Collectively, these countries are home to nearly 290 million people. Among Liberia’s population of 4.1 million, over 1,100 people have already died from Ebola in less than 6 months; by comparison, if this same outbreak and death rate occurred in the United States, over 88,000 Americans would perish.