Looking ahead to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, I encourage readers to check out Chloe Bird‘s latest post for The RAND Blog. In “Assessing and Addressing Women’s Health and Health Care,” Bird explains the knowledge gaps and emphasizes the benefits of changing our approach to health research:

Gender-stratified research can produce more effective decision tools and interventions, and in turn improve both women’s and men’s health and health care.

I have featured her work on women’s cardiovascular health in a past post: it’s an excellent example of why we need to pay attention to sex/gender differences when aiming to improve health care.  Bird cautions of the dangers of failing to make the necessary revisions:

Until access, quality, and outcomes of care are tracked by gender, inequity in treatment will remain invisible and consequently intractable.

As we move forward with the Affordable Care Act, it is important to pay attention to the new assessments and tracking of the quality of care.  In the words of Bird, “This tracking should take gender into account so that disparities in health care and outcomes become visible and get the attention they deserve.”