Atheendar Venkataramani

It’s not the method that makes you causal it’s the assumptions

"Full-day kindergarten expansions were responsible for as much as 24 percent of the growth in employment of mothers with kindergartenaged children in this time frame."

It's a really beautiful and important paper. Congratulations!

Remembering Atul Butte This Medical News article is in remembrance of Atul Butte, MD, PhD, a pioneer in using data science to improve health.

Atul Butte, MD, PhD, helped define the field of translational bioinformatics and inspired countless colleagues and trainees.

He will be remembered for his brilliant mind, infectious optimism, generous mentorship.

Missing data means AI will be as dumb as we are?

Interesting paper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.12388

Getting vaccinated is unpleasant. Dying of measles is worse. In the decade before the 1963 vaccine for measles emerged, an average of 475 Americans died from measles every year, most of them children. This (absolute) number had dropped to a low of 1 in 1981, despite a steadily increasing population that might have hypothetically contributed additional cases. Sadly, the number of measles cases in the United States has been steadily climbing upward again because we seem not to remember the ravages of the disease so much as the inconvenience of the shot—even without taking into account the absurd rejection of the solid scientific evidence in favor of vaccinations. Many people still have an elderly relative who survived a bout of severe childhood illness; not one of us has an elderly relative who did not. The blurring of the historical evidence for and against vaccination that arises from strangely incongruous historical narratives allows a seemingly inconsequential but nonetheless deadly nostalgia to run rampant.

Another example of dangerous reverence for the past concerns the flurry of popular enthusiasm lately (at least if the pundits of the 2016 American election are to be believed) for the “good old days” of the 1950s when a family could live securely on just one income (in these nostalgic accounts, that one income is usually a man’s). Lest we forget, these are the same good old days of poor air quality and measles. Maybe trivial in comparison but certainly indicative of the scope of the cognitive problem that nostalgia presents, the average size of a new home built in America in 1950 was 983 sq. ft.; by 2010, the average size had risen to 2,392 sq. ft. Given that families were larger on average in the 1950s than they were in 2010, per capita space allocation had risen even faster than total area. Although we might not need that much personal space, many of us have become used to it. Older furniture now looks tiny compared to what is now on offer in showrooms, whereas older television sets were behemoths with miniscule screens showing programs in glorious black and white.

Good history helps us avoid nostalgia. The great article “Economic History and the Historians” (2020) by Anne McCants reminds me why nostalgia can get us in trouble. Two of her examples are very relevant to today: vaccinations and the popular narrative of some economic “good old days.”

Can you get help when you lose your job?

A lot of Americans' introduction to Unemployment Insurance is anything but easy. Laid off, they have to navigate an application process that could result in not that much money.

Optimists, we can do better. Tune in:
rss.com/podcasts/opt...

Whoa...

Ooh!! it wasn't the one I had seen but this one is new to me, looks awesome, and I'm really glad you posted this!

Hi all!

A while back on X and here people circulated an article on mono-causal versus multi-causal explanations (couched in a discourse on complex systems) for different phenomena.

Does anyone have a link or citation?

#research #medsky #econsky

Opinion | ‘The Power of Science to Solve Problems Is Almost Limitless’

This is an interesting article on the #NIH, the #future of #science, and whether science and #reason can thrive in this era of toxic information ecosystems and politics.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/o...

(I know a lot of academics have issues with this piece. But there is a lot to think about here)

Congratulations Corinne! I pre-ordered this and am exciting to read next week!

One of many reasons I've been quiet on here recently. Plenty of work to be done to make the world better off of social media.

Featured in the latest Digest: Expelling Japanese Americans Lowered US Farm Productivity

https://www.nber.org/digest/202509/expelling-japanese-americans-lowered-us-farm-productivity

Can economic opportunity lower mortality? Exploiting the fracking boom: job growth lowered medically treatable deaths (e.g. cardiovascular), likely via increased insurance coverage, but had no effect on external causes such as Deaths of Despair. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

On the beauty and wide applicability of the #GrossmanModel -- from the pages of the JPE to the clinic!

#healtheconomics

Thanks Aaron! And thanks for the feedback on this idea in seminar a year ago! It helped us clarify the writing and presentation!!

Question Has hospital length of stay increased more for Medicare Advantage beneficiaries than for traditional Medicare beneficiaries since the COVID-19 pandemic?Findings In this cohort study involving more than 89 million hospitalizations from 2017 to the third quarter of 2023, Medicare Advantage beneficiaries experienced disproportionately greater increases in extended hospital stays, especially among those discharged to skilled nursing facilities.Meaning These findings suggest that the Medicare Advantage plan design and practices may contribute to hospital discharge delays, with implications for patient outcomes and hospital capacity as enrollment continues to rise.

New paper w/ Brian McGarry, Ashvin Gandhi, and Drew Wilcock in @jamainternalmed.com!

Hospitals are complaining across the US that patients are "stuck" waiting for rehab beds at nursing homes when they are medically stable and ready for discharge. What is going on??

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Embracing Uncertainty: The Value of Partial Identification in Public Health and Clinical Research This paper describes the methodology of partial identification methods and its applicability to empirical research in preventive medicine and public health. The authors summarize findings from the met...

3/ More on the use of partial identification in clinical medicine (and public health) in this explainer (with @dlmillimet.bsky.social, @johnmullahy.bsky.social, Chuck Manski)

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

2/ One thing I learned in working on this is that the #naturalexperiments we use for #health #policy may not be well suited to *specific* clinical questions. Knowledge of the institutional context becomes even more key.

We conclude our review with a short section on partial identification.

Natural Experiments to Inform Clinical Practice Natural experiments refer to events or practices that result in similar individuals receiving different services or interventions for arbitrary reasons. In the clinical context, researchers may wis...

1/ #NaturalExperiments are increasingly being used to answer #clinicalquestions, like how does treatment X affect disease outcome Y.

Recent review by Lizzie Bair and me in NEJM Evidence covers examples and best practices for these types of studies:

evidence.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

5/ Moving forward, it's worth explicitly measuring and modeling these mechanisms in work on the effects of social and economic policies on health.

Fin.

4/ These "affective" mechanisms -- operating through norms and narratives that change the way people think and view themselves -- are likely operative in many cases where policy effects on health occur in advance of, or are disproportionately large relative to, any material consequences.

3/ The two policies were truth-in-sentencing and three strikes. The latter was widely discussed, often with stigmatizing/racialized language. It's adoption led to immediate reductions in birthweight among Black infants.

See @courtneyboen.bsky.social's thread for more: bsky.app/profile/cour...

2/ #Policies encode or generate norms and narratives that people use to shape their beliefs and expectations about their status in their society and where there future is headed.

An example: two policies with the same objective but different framing had vastly different impacts on health.

Public Policies, Social Narratives, and Population Health | NEJM Public policies, by way of the social narratives they reinforce, can affect health by mechanisms that are independent of any effects on resources and opportunities.

1/ #Policies shape our #health.

But why?

We usually think it has to do with how policies change material resources (e.g., access to food, health care, etc) and opportunities.

In @nejm.org, we argue that policies can also affect health by shaping social #narratives.

www.nejm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

2/ And there's more to come this year:

-Results from first ever Stuckness in America survey

-Results from the IGNITE Study on Concentrated Investment in Low-Income Neighborhoods (cdn.clinicaltrials.gov/large-docs/0...)

-Redesigned website

Check us out!
opportunityforhealth.org

1/ Opportunity for Health (@oppforhealthlab.bsky.social) is 5 years old today!

I can't think of a better way to kick off our anniversary than embarking on this multi-year study on #job #reskilling and #health with a fantastic Philly based partner, The Skills Initiative.

Home-Based Care for Hypertension in Rural South Africa | NEJM Poorly controlled hypertension is a common problem worldwide, particularly in low-resource settings. We conducted an open-label, randomized, controlled trial of a home-based model of hypertension c...

I'll never forget the man in his 30s, brought to us by family in the middle of the night, unable to move his entire left side because of a massive stroke.

His risk factor? Excessively high blood pressure.

This intervention by Siedner et al would have saved him:
www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

Public Policies, Social Narratives, and Population Health | NEJM Public policies, by way of the social narratives they reinforce, can affect health by mechanisms that are independent of any effects on resources and opportunities.

#Policies can affect our #health by shaping and transmitting social narratives and affect people's #beliefs about their current and future status -- independent of any impacts they have on people's material circumstances.

See our new #paper in @nejm.org: www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....