AcademyHealth President Aaron Carroll welcomed attendees to the 2026 Research Meeting and highlighted the organization’s efforts to counter the federal cutbacks and policy changes. (Photos: Hoag Levins)
Addressing attendees at AcademyHealth’s 2026 Annual Research Meeting in Seattle, AcademyHealth President Aaron Carroll, MD, MS, described the past year as an unprecedented challenge for health services research, citing federal funding freezes, disappearing health data, agency cutbacks, canceled advisory meetings, and disruptions that halted or delayed important research projects.
Carroll said AcademyHealth responded by taking a more active advocacy role than ever before. The organization documented funding disruptions, pressed Congress and federal agencies for action, and worked with journalists and policymakers to restore stalled research funding. Those efforts helped restart dozens of grants and release nearly $40 million in previously frozen federal research funds.
He also highlighted AcademyHealth’s efforts to preserve access to federal health data, including joining litigation that successfully challenged the removal of government databases and websites. In addition, he voiced concern about actions affecting the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, arguing that scientific recommendations must remain independent and evidence-based rather than subject to political pressures.
Carroll warned that the nation’s health research pipeline is under strain, preventing evidence from reaching policymakers and improving care. In response, AcademyHealth is reorganizing its work around strengthening research systems, expanding access to evidence, and helping research findings move more quickly into practice. He closed by urging attendees to remain engaged and support the organization’s efforts to defend the role of science and evidence in health policy.
Here is what the four-day conference looked like for fellows, staff, and students of Penn’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI):
Manning the University of Pennsylvania Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) booth in the AcademyHealth 2026 Expo Hall are Caleb Hearn, MPH, PMP, LDI Partnership Project Manager, and Christine Weeks, LDI Director of Strategic Initiatives.
Before a packed, standing-room-only crowd, LDI Senior Fellow David Grande, MD, MPA, discussed Pennsylvania’s implementation of the new five-year, $50 billion federal initiative designed to stabilize and modernize rural hospitals. A Penn professor and Special Advisor to the state Department of Human Services Secretary, he detailed plans for working through rural collaboratives to determine what changes are needed to improve rural services.
Chairing a panel discussing the impact of Medicare markets, networks, and coverage rules on the use and quality of skilled nursing facilities and home health programs was Rachel M. Werner, MD, PhD, Executive Director of LDI and a professor of Health Care Management and Economics at the Wharton School and Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine.
Thirty-nine scholars from the University of Pennsylvania’s Summer Undergraduate Mentored Research (SUMR) program attended the AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting as part of LDI’s activities. From 27 different schools across the country, they are mostly undergraduates interested in exploring careers in health services research.
Joanne Levy, MBA, MCP, LDI Director of Student Initiatives and Founding Director of the SUMR program, chats with AcademyHealth President Aaron Carroll, MD, MS. Last year, SUMR won the AcademyHealth 2025 Mosaic Award for its work advancing health equity in the health services research (HSR) field by channeling undergraduates toward advanced HSR degrees.
Evidence of the SUMR program’s success can be found in former SUMR scholars who now routinely pursue academic careers and become scientists presenting work at AcademyHealth. This is Dev Gupta, a 2025 SUMR scholar and member of the Class of 2027 at Case Western Reserve University, who became part of his SUMR mentors’ research team, co-authoring a new study of hospital ownership types.
2021 SUMR Scholar Aditi Doiphode is now a medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and began researching how disadvantage indices were used to allocate COVID-19 vaccines and care in vulnerable populations. Shown here, she appears on an AcademyHealth panel titled “Using Disadvantage Indices for Promoting Health Equity: Emerging Insights and Open Questions.”
LDI Senior Fellow Aaron Schwartz, MD, PhD, chaired an AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting session on Medicare Advantage (MA). The session, titled “Benefit Design, Coding Practices, and Federal Spending: Policy Challenges in Medicare Advantage,” examined how aggressive diagnostic coding and plan designs affect federal spending and care quality within the MA program. Schwartz was last year’s winner of the AcademyHealth Alice S. Hersh Emerging Leader Award.
Director of the Penn Center for Health Care Improvement and Patient Safety (CHIPS) and LDI Senior Fellow Jennifer Myers, MD, chaired a panel focused on Learning Health System (LHS) workforce issues. LHS is an integrated model in which clinical practice data, patient experiences, and external medical evidence are continuously analyzed to inform changes that improve care quality, safety, and equity.
A biobehavioral health scientist at Penn Nursing, LDI Senior Fellow Heather Brom’s AcademyHealth presentation focused on systemic health inequities in post-hospital care, targeting Medicaid and dually eligible patients. It detailed a 24-month clinical study designed to address a major gap in transitional care: While home health services reduce hospital readmissions, fewer than 20% of eligible Medicaid patients receive a referral upon discharge.
Chaired by LDI Senior Fellow Harald Schmidt, PhD, this panel stemmed from a series of high-level workshops convened in 2021 focused on deploying geospatial disadvantage indices to steer health care resources equitably during acute scarcity, drawing on lessons from COVID-19. It evaluated how place-based metrics could shift from emergency-response tools into permanent fixtures for advancing public health equity.
Current SUMR scholars making the rounds of the expo hall are Josef Miller, a rising junior at Washington University in St. Louis studying Math+Economics and Public Health & Society; Tulah Jefferson, a rising junior at Emory University studying Human Health and Data Science; and Aaron Kim, a rising junior at the University of Richmond pursuing a double major in Mathematical Economics and Health Studies.
Touring the poster hall are current SUMR scholars Samuel Abakisi, a rising sophomore at Williams College pursuing a BA in Biology and Neuroscience, and Joe Abou-Khalil, a rising senior at Yale University pursuing a BS in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology.
LDI Senior Fellow Karen Lasater, PhD, RN, presented Penn data supporting Pennsylvania’s “Safe Staffing” legislation. She evaluated wide variations in nurse workloads across Pennsylvania hospitals, ranging from three to 11 patients per nurse. Her research showed that mandating a 1:4 patient-to-nurse limit on medical-surgical units would improve patient survival, reduce hospital stays by nearly 40,000 days annually, lower burnout, and save millions through reduced readmissions.
Chairing a crowded panel session on Learning Health Systems was LDI Senior Fellow Robert Burke, MD, MS. He focused on the mechanics of LHS as an ecosystem in which science, informatics, incentives, and culture are aligned for continuous improvement and innovation. In practice, this means health systems systematically use their own clinical data to study outcomes, learn what works, and rapidly apply those insights to improve patient care.
This panel focused on improving postpartum discharge teaching — a critical window, as communication breakdowns contribute heavily to preventable maternal mortality. LDI Senior Fellow Rebecca Clark‘s study used Video-Reflexive Ethnography (VRE) to record real-world discharge sessions between nurses and first-time mothers. Clinicians and patients independently reviewed the videos, and nurses held group reflexivity sessions to optimize care, bridge communication gaps, and advance health equity.
While the AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting is about keeping up with the latest developments, it is also a kind of homecoming for former colleagues. Stopping by the LDI expo booth in that spirit were Nora Becker, MD, PhD, of the University of Michigan Medical School, and Karin Rhodes, MD, MS, a Special Advisor to the Pennsylvania Secretary of Human Services, both former Penn faculty members and LDI Senior Fellows.
