Public Health Issues

Why is Public Health Optimization important to Kurt?

Kurt is passionate about public health issues because it addresses health equity and disparities within our nation. Although Kurt’s current focus is on the Building Healthy Military Communities (BHMC) pilot program, the program also addresses health disparities for civilians within the state. There are specific populations that lack proper access to health care within our nation and Kurt has worked with both local and state leaders to address these disparities.

How Kurt Addresses Health Disparities and Research:

Kurt choses to use data mining and analytics working with the Robert Johnson Foundation to look at country health rankings. His SBAR (Situational, Background, Assessment, Recommendation) reports target the root cause for issues seen within our local populations. Kurt believes that taking a middle of the road approach is always a great option when looking at population health. For instance, one of his papers found that Chronic Pain Patients (CPP) have been neglected ever since new CDC guidelines came out in 2016 attacking opioid pain medication. His regression and k-means cluster analysis displayed that prescription opioids were down 40%, yet overdoses were increasing. The number of opioid prescriptions by a doctor and the number of patients taking proscribed opioids had no significant p-values on the dependent variable (overdoses). The significant p-values came from risky behaviors, socio-economic issues, illicit drug use, and mental health problems. With this study we can discern that main cause of opioid overdoses is due to health disparities and equity, not because physicians are writing too many scripts, or everybody is an addict to pain medication. What we had was a pendulum swing, and many people committing suicide because they could not have access to pain medication under a physician supervision anymore. What policy has done is send good people to the street to look for hard illicit drugs to help their pain, hence why overdoses are still increasing!

Download Kurt's opioid research paper here: Download my paper.

Public Health Text Graph of Key Concepts!