Our new NBER Working Paper has posted, with Jason Abaluck , Nirmal Ravi, Anja Sautmann, and Robert Pless. We studied LLM-assisted health care in a low-resource setting, with real patients in primary care. Our evaluation involved on-site physicians and lab testing. www.nber.org/papers/w34660

Doctor LLMs don't want you to know this one weird trick

Brava: “If I don’t file a complaint, then what message does that send to all Mexican women?” Ms. Sheinbaum said at her daily news conference, noting sexual harassment was a crime… “If this can happen to the president, what’s going to happen to all the young women & women across our country?”

Every single woman you know has had this happen to her. Even the goddamn president of Mexico.

A beautiful tribute to Sue Goldie, capturing her brilliance, determination, & humility: "Sue is not a swimmer, cyclist or runner. She will become the rare triathlete, she says, 'who sucks at all three.'" Her work has been an inspiration. Her athletic accomplishments amidst Parkinson's, next level.

If you're in health policy or medicine and confused about what to do with all the recent DiD innovations -- or curious about their adoption in the medical literature -- @brownbiostatistics.bsky.social PhD student Shuo Feng has you covered! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Want advice from a physician who cares for pregnant women and a researcher who studies medication risks for pregnant women (instead of from politicians)? Here's the latest from Professor Alyssa Bilinski and Dr. Katherine McDaniel in @statnews.com. ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Amazed that this is still written in NYT in 2025. With RCTs, we would have better evidence on acetaminophen in pregnancy with fewer individuals exposed. Why are we forcing everyone to experiment and not learning from it? www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/h...

"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?" Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.

Back from travels to share some Highland cows and our write-up about pregnancy research in Stat! www.statnews.com/2025/08/12/p...

Breaking: The Trevor Project received a stop-work order last night on its contract with the national 988 suicide prevention hotline. The Trump administration is eliminating the option for LGBTQ callers to the hotline to press 3 and connect with someone who specializes in LGBTQ mental health.

BREAKING: A federal judge in Massachusetts (the Reagan-appointed William Young) has declared the Trump administration's cuts to NIH grants — ostensibly over Trump's EOs on gender ideology and DEI — are "illegal" and "void." He's ordering many grants restored.

In a new memo, @pennldi.bsky.social and @yalesph.bsky.social researchers project that, based on available evidence, the rollback of coverage in the House-passed reconciliation bill will lead to 42,500 additional deaths per year. d197nivf0nbma8.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025...

*Every time* we present on pregnant inclusion in clinical trials, one or two women come up afterward and say, "This happened to me too" -- with depression, anxiety, asthma, epilepsy, hypertension, nausea, glaucoma. Natalia Emanuel, Andrea Ciaranello, and I took at stab at counting these harms.

“A common concern is that we shouldn’t ‘experiment’ on pregnant people—but the reality is that we already are,” Professor Alyssa Bilinski says. “Every time a pregnant person takes an untested medication it’s an uncontrolled experiment.” sph.brown.edu/news/2025-05...

How do you devastate an already-fragile system? Target its workers AND its funding. In our @statnews.com op-ed, @rachelwerner.bsky.social and I explore how immigration enforcement & Medicaid cuts will impact millions who depend on long-term care—and what we can do. www.statnews.com/2025/05/30/l...

For anyone else who needs grant deadline music. www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7C8...

"[T]he impact is larger than any single lab or the University itself — it is a dismantling of the national research enterprise and the loss of a generation of scientists." www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

BREAKING: In a serious blow to US pandemic flu preparedness, HHS has cancelled a contract with Moderna to test and license prototype vaccines for #H5N1 #birdflu and other potential pandemic viruses. In a pandemic, mRNA is the fastest way to vaccine doses. www.statnews.com/2025/05/28/m...

I recently experimented to see whether ChatGPT could be used to generate misleading anti-vaccine information, particularly about autism. I was not heartened by the results...

Worth noting: we previously projected that if pregnant individuals been vaccinated at the same rate as age- and state-matched women, we would have averted 20% of maternal COVID-19 deaths (i.e., 8% of ALL maternal deaths) from March-November 2021. doi.org/10.7326/ANNA...

“We wanted to understand the trends in maternal, fetal and infant deaths in the U.S., but that turned out to be tricky," Professor Alyssa Bilinski says. Learn how she and colleagues disentangled 20 years of health data to arrive at their concerning findings. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/04/29/m...

A new study finds that at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, US maternal deaths nearly doubled, reaching 18.9 deaths for every 100,000 live births. The findings highlight the importance of accurately tracking maternal health data, Professor Alyssa Bilinski says. www.brown.edu/news/2025-04...

🧵New survey paper: "Inference with Few Treated Units" Luis Alvarez, Bruno Ferman and Kaspar Wüthrich Tired of referees saying your standard errors are wrong? This survey will help you understand if you really have a problem — and, if so, how to fix it!

Has maternal mortality been increasing in the US? Previous reports have noted a drastic increase in US maternal mortality. This was largely among "cause unspecified" deaths, leading to suggestions that some or all of these trends may be driven by changes in reporting. We took a closer look. 1/n

I wrote a letter to the editor replying to a JAMA viewpoint that said we shouldn’t experiment with being more generous to nondirected donors of kidneys for transplant. JAMA readers won’t see my letter, but you can see it below. #econsky #lawsky #medicine marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2025/04/jama...

On Monday the Supreme Court hears a case that could strike down the ACA mandate that insurers cover preventive services at no cost to patients. We found that ~40 million people with private insurance use these free services, including half of enrolled women. JAMA Health Forum: ja.ma/3GcUZC6 🩺📊

Now there's a memorable stat! "Colleges and universities are among America’s most competitive international exporters. In dollar terms, last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined." wapo.st/3EvzMCI

I had been doubtful that we were going to have a "this is the crisis moment" with Trump, as opposed to "everything about this is a destructive catastrophe." But the Abrego Garcia case is the crisis moment. 1/

Game on. ✊

Proud of Shuo Feng's research highlighted at Brown's Public Health Research Day -- "How Do We Know It Works? A Test-Driven Development Framework for Large Language Model-Supported Coding of Disease Simulation Models" www.brown.edu/news/2025-04...

New preprint on how to approach antimicrobial use and resistance from a causal perspective led by Juan Gago and @cboyer.bsky.social @ccdd-hsph.bsky.social www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

I have tariffed the penguins that are on Heard Island and which you were probably assuming did not export goods forgive me they were taking advantage of us so cunning and so cold

I for one would love to be as spontaneous as PowerPoint when it’s picking the font size of whatever my next bullet item is

Hear hear, @nickkristof.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/interactive/... 🎁

Less than 1% of clinical drug trial participants are pregnant, according to a study by Professor @ambilinski.bsky.social. "While it may seem risky to include pregnant people in research, it’s even worse to leave them guessing," she says in @futuritynews.bsky.social.

After 1,000 National Park Service employees were abruptly fired on February 14, staff banded together to signal “dire distress” by draping an upside-down American flag from the 3,000-foot summit of Yosemite’s iconic El Capitan monolith.

I hear that the extremely cool Medicaid director in Oregon (IYKYK) is looking for a chief of staff: oregon.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/SOR_Ex...