Meet Dr Joel Segel, AJAC's Newest Editorial Board Member

The American Journal of Accountable Care^® (AJAC) recently added Joel Segel, PhD, associate professor of health policy and administration at Penn State University, to its editorial board. Here, Segel talks about what he's looking forward to as part of the board and the role AJAC plays in addressing health equity during the transition to the Enhancing Oncology Model (EOM).

Transcript:

What are you most excited for in joining the AJAC editorial board?

I'm certainly excited about joining AJAC. I think what's exciting is it's at that intersection of research, policy, and practice. And I think what's really interesting on the research side is getting good ideas about what might work, and then also on the other end, trying to evaluate existing ideas and seeing what actually works. What gets exciting on the research side is you help to inform practice, you help to inform policy, because I think there's always a lot of ideas, and some of them work, and some of them don't work as well, and sometimes they work in one place but not as well in another. So I think this is where it can be important to have an outlet to publish and disseminate this type of work.

What unique perspective do you hope to bring to the AJAC editorial board?

I hope I bring a couple. One would be, I certainly have had a bunch of research experience in a number of different settings in terms of thinking about evaluating policies, evaluating programs, different work in that kind of area. I bring some expertise in the oncology area, and also in the behavioral health area, and so I think those are sort of prime areas where it's important to learn about what works and what doesn't. And I guess the last one would be having done work in a number of different settings, whether it's with different payers or with different providers. As an example, I've been doing some work in terms of cancer screening and some cancer treatment in the Military Health System. The idea there is always, “How can we learn from from one sector and translate it into some of the other ones?”

How can health care providers promote health equity in the shift to EOM, and what role does AJAC play in these efforts?

I think it's certainly a partnership, and the idea is, “How do we learn from what works and even what doesn't necessarily work?” I think it's always important.... We try to implement an idea that seems like it might work, and even if it doesn't work perfectly, you can learn a lot about [how] maybe it worked for this group and not this other group or that we learned what not to do. I think what AJAC can do—and I think it's the accountable part of the accountable care part—is that it's this idea of, how do you bring evidence to what organizations are doing? How do we figure out what works and how do we disseminate that? And how do we actually make sure we're rigorously evaluating different ideas, different programs, different policies?

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity.