2015 Articles

Salutatory from the Editor-in-Chief

Shah, Ravi

This is a critical time for health and medicine. While this sentiment has certainly been expressed before with the utmost earnestness, its message cannot be overstated. Disparities in health outcomes continue to deepen across socioeconomic and racial lines, reimbursement and insurance coverage structures grow in complexity, costs balloon, ethical dilemmas increase in frequency and in subtlety, measurable personal and population health data points expand, the population ages, and scientific leaders wish health decision-making to more strongly inform our policy makers. Meanwhile, physicians and physician-scientists are increasingly limited to specialized spheres by delivery models that reshape their identities as one piece of an ever-complex hospital ecosystem. In the world of publishing today, academic journals are flourishing in more and more specified fields. At the same time, the "echo-chamber" effect of the internet allows fringe perspectives to multiply without appropriate peer review while simultaneously allowing important findings to be drowned out by ambient noise.