The poster exposition hall of the AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting (ARM) is always one of its most popular — and crowded — features. In this year’s expo, nearly a thousand poster topics spanned a broad cross-section of contemporary health services research, examining how health care systems are organized, financed, staffed, and regulated, and how those decisions affect patient outcomes, access to care, costs, workforce well-being, and health equity. Subjects ranged from Medicaid policy, Medicare oversight, maternity and neonatal care, nurse staffing and burnout, mental health services, telehealth, chronic disease management, and reproductive health policy to the growing role of artificial intelligence, clinical decision support, and electronic health record data in improving care delivery and workforce performance.
The work of LDI Fellows and associates was a significant presence across the poster hall. Here are some examples:
LDI Senior Fellow Karen Lasater, PhD, RN, Endowed Chair of Nursing and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, explains why post-pandemic nursing work conditions remain worse than before COVID, with rising levels of job dissatisfaction and more nurses saying they lack confidence in their management to act in the best interests of patients.
LDI Senior Fellow Matthew McHugh, PhD, RN, Director of the Penn Nursing Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research, mans the poster describing a study that found that nurses are more likely to return to hospital employment if hospitals address chronic understaffing, insufficient wages and benefits, and the inflexible scheduling practices that are causing so many nurses to leave their jobs.
LDI Associate Fellow Diana Bongiorno, MD, MPH, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the National Clinician Scholars Program at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, explains that a combination of a lack of hospital-based obstetric (OB) services and factors such as rural location and lower emergency department (ED) visit volumes may be associated with greater challenges in caring for ED patients with OB emergencies.
The effects of the unionization of medical residents on hospital staffing and patient outcomes are the topic of LDI Associate Fellow Aidan Crowley’s poster. An MD-PhD student in the Wharton School, she explained that hospitals may respond to unionization by cutting back on other staff, and that may have negative effects on patient mortality.
LDI Senior Fellow Elizabeth Salazar, MD, MSHP, an Assistant Professor of Neonatology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, had a poster on perinatal market competition and neonatal costs in Michigan showing that hospitals in highly competitive had the best neonatal outcomes and moderate competition hospitals had the lowest costs.
LDI Senior Fellow Rebecca Clark, PhD, RN, an Assistant Professor of Family and Community Health at the Penn School of Nursing, led a study exploring first-time mothers’ experiences in the postpartum discharge teaching encounters in three different types of hospitals. Her study recommends the development of standardized, patient-centered teaching protocols.
Meghan Carey, PhD, an Associate LDI Fellow and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Perelman School Center for Mental Health, conducted a study of Medicaid managed care priorities and practices related to youth mental health. She found that stakeholders were concerned they are not meeting the needs of youth with specific diagnoses and those seeking treatment in acute care settings.
Penn Nursing School PhD student Domenique Villani, MPH, RN, an Associate LDI Fellow, was co-author with LDI Senior Fellow Eileen Lake, PhD, RN, of a study of workplace challenges and policy responses in the nursing workforce across several Caribbean countries. They found that policy responses were uneven across countries and often insufficient to address systemic issues.
A former 2025 LDI SUMR scholar, Dev Y. Gupta graduates from Case Western Reserve University in 2027. He is the co-author with LDI Senior Fellows Scott Lorch, MD, and Elizabeth Salazar, MD, MSHP, of a study on hospital ownership type that found that hospitals with religious, private equity and for-profit ownership were more likely to experience change in ownership.
Former LDI SUMR scholars Aditi Halpe and Rachel Suh, students in the Penn Medicine Center for Health Equity Advancement, co-authored a study of perspectives on diagnosing chronic kidney disease with LDI Senior Fellows Renée Betancourt, MD, and Jaya Aysola, MD, MPH. Their findings suggest the need for plain-language patient information resources to enhance supportive management.
Sherif Olanrewaju, PhD, MPS, an LDI Associate Fellow and Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn Nursing’s Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research, discussed his study co-authored with LDI Senior Fellow Eileen Lake, PhD, RN, of a cross-sectional analysis of the Scottish nurse staffing act’s provisions.
Jordan Wood, MPH, of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia explained her study, co-authored with LDI Senior Fellow Chén Kenyon, MD, MSHP, that developed electronic health record-based definitions to accurately identify which children with persistent asthma were eligible for a new single maintenance and reliever therapy (SMART) inhaler approach.
Vrushabh Ladage, MHCI, MS, Senior Research Scientist at the Penn Parity Center, discussed his study of GLP-1 therapy co-authored with LDI Senior Fellows Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD, and Amol S. Navathe, MD, PhD. It found that despite the high cost of GLP-1 medications, their overall medical costs during the following year were about the same as nonusers because GLP-1 users tended to have lower hospital costs and fewer serious complications.
LDI Associate Fellow Hyunmin Yu, PhD, RN, of Penn Nursing presents his study co-authored with LDI Senior Fellow Matthew McHugh, PhD, RN, on Oregon’s statewide nursing staffing law. It was a large-scale qualitative study using human and AI-assisted analysis that found that some management teams are implementing the law in an inflexible, almost punitive manner, but that this is a management issue, not a problem with the law itself.
