Publications from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine provide objective and straightforward advice to decision makers and the public. This site includes Health and Medicine Division (HMD) publications released after 1998. A complete list of HMD’s publications from its establishment in 1970 to the present is available as a PDF.

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  Advancing the Power of Economic Evidence to Inform ... Released: April 13, 2016

  Advancing the Power of Economic Evidence to Inform Investments in Children, Youth, and Families highlights the potential for economic evidence to inform investment decisions for interventions that support the overall health and well-being of children, youth, and families. This report describes challenges to the optimal use of economic evidence, and offers recommendations to stakeholders to promote a lasting improvement in its quality, utility, and use.
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  Eliminating the Public Health Problem of Hepatitis B and C in ... Released: April 11, 2016

  Viral hepatitis is the seventh leading cause of death in the world, killing more people than road traffic injuries, HIV and AIDS, or diabetes. Every year chronic viral hepatitis, of which hepatitis B and C are the most common forms, kills a million people, roughly 20,000 of them in the United States. These deaths could be prevented. Hepatitis B vaccine conveys 95 percent immunity, and new therapies for hepatitis C cure the vast majority of patients.
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  Systems Practices for the Care of Socially At-Risk Populations ... Released: April 07, 2016

  The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, acting through the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene an ad hoc committee to identify social risk factors that affect the health outcomes of Medicare beneficiaries and methods to account for these factors in Medicare payment programs.
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  Global Health Impacts of Vector-Borne Diseases: Workshop ... Released: April 05, 2016

  Pathogens transmitted among humans, animals, or plants by insects and arthropod vectors have been responsible for significant morbidity and mortality throughout recorded history. Such vector-borne diseases—including malaria, dengue, yellow fever, plague, trypanosomiasis, and leishmaniasis—together accounted for more human disease and death in the 17th through early 20th centuries than all other causes combined. Domestic and international capabilities to detect, identify, and effectively respond to vector-borne diseases are limited.
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  Reaching and Investing in Children at the Margins: Workshop ... Released: March 16, 2016

  On November 3–4, 2015, the Forum on Investing in Young Children Globally of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine,1 in partnership with the Open Society Foundations and the International Step by Step Association (ISSA), held a workshop in Prague, Czech Republic, to examine the science and economics of investing in the health, education, nutrition, and social protection of children at the margins of society.
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  Supporting Family and Community Investments in Young ... Released: March 14, 2016

  To examine the science, policy, and practice surrounding supporting family and community investments in young children globally and children in acute disruptions, the Forum on Investing in Young Children Globally held a workshop in partnership with the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from July 27–29, 2015.
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  Cancer Care in Low-Resource Areas: Cancer Prevention and ... Released: March 10, 2016

  Effective low-cost cancer control options are available for some malignancies, but these interventions remain inaccessible for many people in the world, especially those residing in low-resource communities. Disparities in cancer outcomes can also be found in high-income countries—communities within wealthier nations especially if they have challenges accessing cancer prevention and cancer care services.
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  Veterans and Agent Orange: Update 2014 : Health and ... Released: March 10, 2016

  From 1962 to 1971, US military sprayed herbicides over Vietnam. Congress passed the Agent Orange Act of 1991 to address whether exposure to these herbicides contributed to long term health effects in Vietnam veterans. The legislation directed the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to request the IOM to perform a comprehensive evaluation of scientific and medical information regarding possible health effects of exposure to Agent Orange and other herbicides used in Vietnam or to TCDD and other chemicals in those herbicides. Veterans and Agent Orange: Update 2014 is the tenth and last congressionally mandated biennial update. The current update presents this committee’s review of peer-reviewed scientific reports relevant to this question that were published between October 1, 2012, and September 30, 2014, and its integration with the previously established evidence database.
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  Informing Social Security's Process for Financial Capability ... Released: March 09, 2016

  With support from SSA, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a committee to evaluate SSA’s capability determination process for adult beneficiaries with disabilities and provide recommendations for improving the accuracy and efficiency of the agency’s policy and procedures for making these determinations. In Informing Social Security’s Process for Financial Capability Determination, the committee presents a conceptual model for financial capability and reviews requisite abilities for managing or directing the management of benefits, methods and measures for assessing financial capability, the use of capacity assessment tools, and effects on the beneficiary of appointing a representative payee.
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  Metrics That Matter for Population Health Action: Workshop ... Released: March 08, 2016

  David Kindig, Professor Emeritus and Emeritus Vice-Chancellor, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said not only is there an overabundance of measures and indicators available for measuring various aspects of population health, but there have been multiple efforts to examine the nature, validity, uses, and usefulness of existing measures with the goal of simplifying existing sets to meet the needs of all decision makers, from policymakers to communities, without much success in meeting that goal.