S T A T E & HILL
pressure, diabetes, and depression— that need to be managed for a healthy delivery and a healthy baby.” Davis says his public policy training has given him a valuable perspective for addressing health and health care challenges. “Sometimes the questions that I ask, and the problems I find compelling, sound and look more familiar to my colleagues in policy than to my peers in health care,” says Davis. “But that’s not a problem…it’s an asset. I really count on my formal background in public policy, and the expertise and discussions I’ve been part of at the Ford School, to help me do the best job I can in this still relatively new role.” While working as chief medical executive, Davis will continue to serve on the faculty at U-M.
Illustration: © 2013 Mark McGinnis, C/O theispot.com
health care,” says Davis. “That said, there’s a very strong commitment, from the Governor’s office on down, to look unflinchingly at these disparities and commit to doing things differently than we have in the past.” Among the many socioeconomic health disparities Davis hopes to address is the state’s deeply troubling infant mortality rate. For every 1,000 live births in Michigan, seven infants die before their first birthday—well above the national average. Among black infants, or infants born in cities with high poverty rates like Detroit, that number can be twice as high. Asked if he thinks expanded Medicaid can solve the problem, Davis says he does. “Other states that already have more generous Medicaid coverage for adults (regardless of whether or not they’re pregnant) have shown us that when you cover women prior to their pregnancies, you can address conditions—such as high blood
To help other health care professionals acquire this kind of broader policy lens, Davis is teaching a free online course through Coursera, a massive open online curriculum (MOOC) platform that the University of Michigan launched last year. Davis’s course, “Understanding and Improving the U.S. Health Care System,” enrolled more than 10,000 domestic and international students when it was first offered this fall—many of them health care professionals and administrators. The course includes video interviews with Ford School faculty members Helen Levy , a staffer for President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Dr. John J.H. “Joe” Schwarz , a physician and former U.S. Congressman (R-MI), who bring their unique perspectives to the material. “Very few medical schools have the faculty base with which to provide health policy education,” says Davis, but “for health care providers to be functioning at their best, they need to know how the health care system is supposed to work, and how they can help to improve it.” ■
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ecently, Matt Davis and his research staff developed WellSpringboard, an online platform for crowdsourcing—and crowdfunding—health research ideas, pairing these groups
with the scientists best placed to address these issues. “In our health care system, and in systems around the world, we don’t involve the public much in asking the questions. We only ask them to participate in studies that come from researchers’ questions,” says Davis. He strongly believes that the dynamic between patients and researchers must be “disruptively altered” to advance medical research while enhancing public trust, participation, and innovation.
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