Health Affairs

Jonathan Ripp, MD, MPH, is the dean for well-being and resilience and the chief wellness officer at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Editor's Note This article is part of a Health Affairs Forefront series titled “ New Challenges for Health Care .” The series of articles

We have an important window of opportunity for policy interventions to alleviate the burdens of medical debt.

Laura Buddenbaum is program coordinator at State Health and Value Strategies (SHVS), a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation focused on

Shweta Kumar is a clinical teaching fellow in the iPIP Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center.

Approximately face the threat of eviction each year, with evictions increasing in most major cities.

Valarie K. Blake is a professor of law at West Virginia University (WVU) focusing on health care law.

Aashna Lal is a graduate student studying health and social behavior at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Health Affairs' Jeff Byers interviews Healthcare Dive's Rebecca Pifer to discuss the FTC's move to ban noncompete agreements.

Our findings suggest greater emphasis on research, training, and policy making to aid judges' and lawyers' access to and understanding of contemporary science and medical practice. Legislators, judges, and advocates should closely monitor and consider the scientific studies cited by courts since these studies should play an important role in driving policy. Ideally, lawyers and agencies will prioritize getting up-to-date scientific information into the record early in litigation through the use of experts so that any factual inconsistencies can be addressed at the trial and appellate courts levels. Judges have some leeway to conduct independent research apart from that entered into the court record, but this practice should be discouraged as judges generally lack the scientific expertise to fully understand the quality of the scientific studies, absent expert input. While scientific studies may be subsequently retracted as evidence of misconduct comes to light, courts do not have the luxury of revisiting cases decided on the basis of poor science.