If you're submitting an Academy Health annual research meeting abstract, here is my short advice thread on writing a good abstract, mostly based on my experience having reviewed abstracts... @AcademyHealth 1 - Spend a lot of time honing the research objective section. Make it compelling. Make sure you are compelling beyond your study/population by directly linking to larger questions in the field. This is hard, but *really* worth it. (For papers too!! But that's for another day)

COVID led to increased gender disparities in publishing, particularly among more junior cohorts of women. "Our findings suggest that the first wave of the pandemic has created potentially cumulative advantages for men."
journals.plos.org/plosone/articl… It seems like this is generally well known, and yet also generally not being systematically accounted for in hiring or promotion, which means we should expect increased gender disparities in the academic ladder to follow.

Great paper from this fall: shows that state laws restricting firearms among people with domestic violence history are associated with substantial reductions in homicide of pregnant and postpartum women. Led by @maeveellen Authors tease apart different flavors of policy: prohibiting vs. relinquishing firearms, and for those under domestic violence restraining orders vs. those convicted of DV misdemeanors. Overall, effect size differs but direction is same, even with low N and rare events.

A thread of questions white academics might use as a starting point to reflect on our own role in perpetuating racism in academia.

I start with counting (to force us to reckon with hard numbers) and then go to reflections (to force us to reckon with silence):
1/ - how many of the students I advise are students of color?
- what proportion of readings I assign on my syllabus are written by scholars of color?
- what proportion of my course do I devote to issues related to equity?

A thread for profs and insturctors (especially white profs) on making your course content more explicitly inclusive, equity-focused, and anti-racist.

I teach an introductory course for our first year PhD students, and I'm sharing how I currently approach this in this thread. 1/ My course is "Introduction to health services and health policy research". We cover the major areas, foundational studies, and debates in our field. (For example, small area variation, payment policy, improvement and implementation science.) 2/

Are you aware of NIH research supplements to promote diversity? It's basically extra money that can be tacked on to an existing grant to support researchers from underrepresented backgrounds. Awesome for these reasons (short thread keep clicking plz)...
grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/p… These are generous and can support individuals at variety of levels, including jr faculty, post-docs, PhD/master's students, undergrads. For jr faculty they are roughly equivalent to two years of K funding (75% FTE for two years!!!). For PhD students, could cover a yr of funding.

Thread on how academics can use publicly available salary data to benchmark or negotiate their salary. (This won't touch on general salary negotiation, but specifically how to make use of these data to see if you're paid fairly or aid in negotiating a salary). 1/ Background: Many public universities have public salary data by state law. You can look up salaries for any employee. If you systematically use this data, you can get a sense of a fair salary. (even if you are at a private univ, this can be helpful benchmarking. Keep reading.) 2/

Quick thread for those on the academic job market on structuring a cover letter. Here's how I do it (take or leave, of course!). Thread/ First, two notes:
1-This is structured for TT jobs with a research focus/emphasis. Would re-structure for teaching-oriented jobs.
2-I frame my work in two broad orienting questions/areas of interest. I work hard on coming up with these; it’s super helpful. 2/

For job market folks, I thought I'd share how I prepared for these meetings during flyouts last year, which worked well for me and may be useful to others. Related to Marty's thoughts here. (Thread)

https://twitter.com/MartinSGaynor/status/1085543017816178690

First, I come up with an exhaustive list of questions I have about the department, school, university, and organize them. I think my categories usually are department culture, teaching/educational programs, funding, university/school questions. Quick ideas on each 2/

CMS just released a new proposed rule for the Medicare ACO program (SSP). Here's my thread on the major parts of the new rule (summarized in a @health_affairs blog by Seem Verma) and potential implications. Brief version: huge changes; some good, more bad.
healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hbl… One set of major changes: benchmarking. These include incorporating regional benchmarks so as not to penalize ACOs with a large market share who are causing their region's spending to slow. Good thoughts in this thread on how this matters.

https://twitter.com/JMichaelMcW/status/995357346988773376