Can you catch bad health habits from your peers? How about from your subordinates or even your boss? Yes, according to new work from the Smith School. To answer the question, Maj. Vickee Wolcott, who completed a Ph.D. in August, took advantage of a unique aspect of military life. Soldiers are re-assigned to new units every few years, plunging them into new social worlds, and new health cultures. Those new cultures...

When it comes to generating revenue, the U.S. health care system sometimes rewards quantity over quality. Fixing the flawed incentives will require greater transparency about the costs and values of services, experts said Oct. 9-10, 2015, at the sixth annual Workshop on Health IT and Economics, hosted by the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems (CHIDS) at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

Hillary Clinton on Tuesday aligned herself with a growing political movement: People who seek repeal of the Affordable Care Act's "Cadillac Tax," a surcharge on the most generous plans offered by employers. Many businesses have opposed the tax, but so have unions and other advocates for employees — not the usual anti-Obamacare coalition. Smith School senior associate dean for faculty and research Ritu Agarwal takes...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is working to harness fast-accumulating personal health data from the likes of Twitter, Facebook and wearable devices. But more than 90 percent of analysts’ efforts to capitalize on that data falls below the targeted efficiency level for the FDA’s Office of Surveillance and Biometrics in its Center for Device and Radiological Health, said Isaac Chang, who directs post-market surveillance for that office. “We have observations of signals and patterns,” he said. “But they’re one-off maps.”