The News was one of the first visitors to the Peabody’s new exhibits, which feature 2,215 of the 14 million specimens in its collection. The News walks through highlights here.

Main entrance and first floor

Upon walking through the main entrance, guests first encounter a family of four Pteranodon sternbergi. The male flying reptile dinosaur — with an almost 20-foot wingspan — is displayed, wings outstretched, above the information desk. The female fossil climbs along the wall, and two baby Pteranodon sternbergi perch on a neighboring ledge. Like many of the Peabody’s renovations, guests can view this fossil exhibit up close from the second floor.

After stepping through the front door, visitors enter the Burke Hall of Dinosaurs. 

The unmistakable centerpiece is the towering 75-foot-long Brontosaurus, which hangs from the ceiling in its totality. 

As opposed to its former display in the Peabody, the Brontosaurus is now arranged slightly differently than before, reflecting recent scientific discoveries. One of the most notable corrections is its lifted tail. Previously, paleontologists thought that Brontosauruses dragged their tails on the ground.

“When ours was [originally] mounted, it had an unusual kink in it with the tail going down,” Susan Butts, the director of collections and research at the Peabody, told the News. “Biomechanically, the bones don’t move like that.”

The fossil also includes 27 additional vertebrae and ventral ribs based on additional discoveries. Curators also remounted the Brontosaurus’ head to be more proportional to the rest of the body.

The Stegosaurus, with its characteristic kite-shaped plates on its back, is another one of the Hall’s highlights.

Like the Brontosaurus — and many other exhibits in the Peabody — the new Stegosaurus display more accurately depicts the species, Butts said. The exhibit was corrected based on an undergraduate’s senior thesis, which identified previous errors. Following the research, the Peabody resized the dinosaur’s legs to be more proportional to its body, decreased the number of tail spikes from eight to four, and rearranged the back plates, Butts said.

Along the upper wall of the Hall, “The Age of Reptiles” mural serves as an artistic timeline of life on Earth. Painted by Rudolph F. Zallinger ’42 ART ’71 in 1947 as a fresco for the Peabody, the 110-foot painting captures Earth from the Late Devonian to the Cretaceous period. Butts noted that the mural reflects the scientific knowledge of life during the 1940s, meaning the Brontosaurus in the painting still has a dragging tail.

However, visitors don’t interact with only land-based dinosaurs. They are also introduced to the Ancient Ocean in the Hall, where a collection of extinct sea creatures brings to life the world from over 500 years ago. Now, 160 invertebrates are on display, compared to the 26 that were up before the renovations.

According to Butts, the new exhibits highlight some of the most famous pieces in the Peabody’s collections, including sea scorpions, trilobites — marine arthropods that “conquered prehistoric oceans” — and mollusk-like ammonites.

As visitors walk through the first floor, history unfolds from life in the Ancient Ocean to human evolution. 

“The World of Change”

66 million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth, causing over 75 percent of plants and animals to go extinct. The climate and life on the planet were dramatically transformed.

The “World of Change” gallery captures the new life forms that thrived on the planet in its new warm greenhouse environment. The exhibit focuses on the last surviving dinosaurs, birds and mammals following the mass extinction. 

The center of the room features a fossil of a Megacerops, a herbivorous mammal that flourished during this time. Other fossils of herbivores and their adaptive features — including strong and flat molars that could chew through fibrous plants — show Earth as it was 66 million years ago. 

Over time, the Earth began to cool down. By 23 million years ago, the planet became an Icehouse. The following exhibits in the Peabody highlight new lifeforms that thrived in the cooler environment, which eventually gave way to grasslands and hominins — including the human species. 

The human footprint

The Peabody has a new exhibition dedicated to human evolution. Along with panels detailing the impact human evolution has had on the planet, it also features a timeline of human evolution, beginning eight million years ago, when the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees first appeared. 

“The curator made this as a braided stream,” Butts said. “One of the things that’s really interesting about humans now is that we’re the only species. That’s rare.”

The exhibits attempt to describe the flow of evolution and the different migratory patterns of evolving human ancestors, with Africa at its center. On one panel, visitors can see various bronze-cast skulls, which represent different human species, each of which has its own distinctive adaptive features, such as brain size. 

The gallery’s selections also outline how human existence has impacted the Earth. The Peabody shows how research on its collections has shown the impact of human life on animals, plants and other resources.

For Gonzalo Giribet, the director and curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, these vast collections are one of the strengths of university museums, especially when tracking the impact of climate change. 

“We are doing genetic studies on specimens that were collected 10, 50 and 100 years ago, so we see how the genomes of these organisms have changed through time,” Giribet said. “We can see how they respond to climatic variables, population changes or respond to invasive species.”

The rest of the gallery exhibits different animals that once populated the Earth, including land giants, such as the wooly mammoth.    

Second floor

The Peabody’s second floor features human culture galleries, including exhibits on the History of Science and Technology, Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations.

The History of Science and Technology exhibit also describes Yale’s history with science, research and technology. The Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, which was open from 1847 to 1956, helped develop numerous notable scientists and inventors. 

The exhibit also includes labels that explain the school was partially funded by seized Indigenous lands and profits accrued from slavery-associated activities. 

“Eternal Cities” is a structural artwork created by Mohamad Hafez, a Syrian-American artist and architect, who also owns the Pistachio Cafes. The piece, which is a collaboration between Hafez and the Peabody, attempts to represent the millennia of cultures that have shaped Damascus and other cities in the Middle East. 

The artwork includes 3D prints of the Babylonian Collection, found on the neighboring wall of “Eternal Cities.”

“This piece is meant to evoke Damascus or another Middle Eastern city and the millennia of cultures that have existed in this place,” Kailen Rogers, the associate director of exhibitions at the Peabody, told the News. “There’s a nod to the contemporary destruction and loss of culture in the area. There’s also a lot of hope. There are plants, laundry and a lot of glittery gold.”

Beyond the Babylonian collection, the second floor also holds many artifacts from Ancient Egypt and Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations. Some of the pieces in these exhibits, Rogers said, are on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery.

Only the first two floors are currently open to visitors. The Peabody will open the third floor to visitors at an undetermined date in the future.

Though it was previously free to only Yale students and faculty, the Peabody now offers free admission to the general public.

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Heilpern is the former chief operating officer of the Weill Cornell Division at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and worked for 12 years as chair of the department of emergency medicine at Emory University School of Medicine. She will assume the position at Yale New Haven Hospital, the system’s flagship facility, on March 11. On Tuesday, the YNHH system announced that it will promote Pamela Sutton-Wallace SPH ’97, who previously served as interim president of YNHH, to president of the entire system. 

“I’ve had leadership positions that have served on both sides of the academic healthcare coin,” Heilpern said. “Having practiced emergency medicine for about 28 years, [this] gives me the opportunity to really understand life at the frontline, and the care that’s being delivered by the providers and how it feels on the side of patients and families.” 

Prior to Wallace’s interim appointment in 2023, Keith Churchwell was president of the hospital. Before Churchwell, Richard D’Aquila served as both the president of the hospital and for the entire YNHH system for nearly 15 years. 

For Arjun Venkatesh, chair of emergency medicine at the hospital, Heilpern’s appointment represents an important transition in YNHH’s leadership. Heilpern will be one of the few women running a hospital of YNHH’s size — the hospital is one of the largest in the United States. 

“There are not many women who lead hospitals among that top 10 or 20 list,” Venkatesh said, referring to specifically large hospitals. 

Heilpern will assume the role amid many ongoing developments at YNHH. Last week, the News reported on parents’ disapproval of YNHH’s plans to close one of its daycare locations in order to cut costs. 

Last fall, the YNHH system signed a preliminary agreement to acquire three hospitals from Prospect Medical Holdings — Manchester Memorial, Rockville General and Waterbury Health, which has prompted concerns about the system’s expansion, as the Connecticut healthcare giant’s expanding reach could decrease competition and increase patient costs. Amid such concerns, the deal has stalled.

Heilpern said that she is unaware of the charged response to the daycare closures and regards the acquisitions as beyond her role as YNHH president. 

Nevertheless, many YNHH officers expressed optimism about Heilpern and her new position. According to Venkatesh, many medical workers believe Heilpern’s history as an emergency physician will bring an important perspective. 

Venkatesh noted that many hospital presidents do not have a clinical background. However, he said that physician presidents could offer a more well-rounded perspective when determining how to best serve patients.

“I believe that physician-literate leaders can bring their clinical experience and lens of taking care of patients to [the] business leadership and organizational leadership skills you need to be … president of the hospital,” Venkatesh said.

Alan Friedman, the chief medical officer at YNHH, works closely alongside Ena Williams, the chief nursing officer at YNHH, and the president to improve patient care. For Friedman, the new YNHH president’s background could enhance patients’ experiences. 

“Having a president who is so clinically attuned to the day-to-day operations in the critical need to provide high quality, safe care to each and every patient in the most equitable ways, is what we seek to do,” Friedman said. 

Venkatesh also specifically highlighted that Heilpern’s perspective as a physician could help the hospital solve overcrowded hospitals. Her experience in emergency medicine may also help her tackle the wide range of issues in the healthcare system. 

“If you look anywhere in the news today, you’ll see hospitals crumbling,” Venkatesh said. “Having a president who has experience, with the full lens of hospitals and how they operate, and experience working in those kinds of capacity issues is  good for both the hospital and the community.”

In an interview with the News, Heilpern said that her goal is to deliver more accessible and convenient care to patients, especially to develop an efficient care continuum — from a pre-hospital setting, to the hospital and back home again.   

Heilpern also described her goal to deliver quality care through, “the force multiplier,” a collaboration between the School of Medicine, the School of Public Health and the School of Nursing.

“There aren’t too many places in the country, for that matter, in the world, that can pull together the talent that exists in the system, and in the schools,” Heilpern said. 

Yale New Haven Hospital employs over 5000 medical personnel and almost 15,000 staff members.

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During this year’s Open Enrollment period, which began on Nov. 1, 2023 and ended on Jan. 15, 2024, the number of people who enrolled in qualified health plans through Access Health CT, the state’s official healthcare exchange, increased by nearly 20 percent to 129,000, according to Access Health CT. It’s the highest level of enrollment since the state marketplace opened in 2013. 

Among the new enrollees are over 27,000 residents enrolled through the Covered CT program, which provides no-cost coverage to eligible Connecticut residents since the state pays consumer premiums and other costs, according to a news release from Access Health CT.  Compared to the prior enrollment period, with a little over 15,400 Covered CT beneficiaries, the new enrollment numbers represent over a 75 percent increase. 

Over 14,000 are also enrolled in dental coverage through Access Health CT.

Several state officials told the News that the marketplace has become more popular due to Medicaid unwinding, a process in which continuous eligibility provisions in the state’s Medicaid program, previously expanded during the pandemic by federal provisions, are set to expire.

“During the public health emergency, there was the continuous coverage provision, meaning anybody who became eligible for Medicaid maintained their coverage, even if they no longer qualified,” Caroline Ruwet, director of marketing for Access Health CT, told the News.

Creating Access Health CT

The passage of the Affordable Care Act spurred the creation of healthcare marketplaces — or exchanges — of federally-approved health insurance plans that insurance companies are incentivized to offer. In response, Connecticut created Access Health CT a few years later, offering people access to a variety of subsidized health insurance plans. 

The legislation also required insurance companies to adopt an “open enrollment” period during which people can apply for different health insurance plans on the exchanges. Access Health CT, Connecticut’s version of the ACA exchange, directly compares health insurance plans for eligible Connecticut residents. The platform also helps qualified residents to apply for HUSKY, Connecticut’s Medicaid program. 

“[The marketplace] allows folks who don’t qualify for Medicaid but are still in need of reduced cost health care to get a plan on Access Health,” said Connecticut State Rep. Jillian Gilchrest.

According to Howard Forman, professor of economics and public health, marketplaces like Access Health CT play a key role in the American health insurance landscape. The marketplaces provide a bridge for individuals who do not have employer-sponsored health insurance or cannot afford health insurance but still don’t meet the eligibility requirements for Medicaid. 

Ruwet said the Access Health CT application requires individuals to indicate their income, the number of people in their home and their address to confirm they are a Connecticut state resident. 

Based on the application, the system then offers subsidies to people depending on their need. If applicants are in greater need, the Connecticut state government will offer more financial assistance, including via the Covered CT program.

The government subsidizes health insurance plans depending on how far above the poverty line the household is. The marketplace provides a sliding scale subsidy from 125 percent of the federal poverty level up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, said Forman.

According to Ruwet, 80 percent of people on the CT exchange receive financial help.

“When we think about what can you do for this group of people — who don’t work for a large employer or who might be an entrepreneur or who might work a retail bakery or own their own business — [these people] should be able to have access to health insurance,” Forman said. “And this is one more way for it.” 

Medicaid unwinding and increased enrollment

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act in 2020, which required that states keep Medicaid beneficiaries continuously enrolled through the end of the federal public health emergency so that states were prohibited from regularly reevaluating individuals’ eligibility.

In return, states received enhanced matching funds for their Medicaid programs. Individuals could remain enrolled in Medicaid programs even if their standard Medicaid eligibility fluctuated due to changing income or other life circumstances.

However, in April 2023, continuous coverage policies expired as the federal government announced the end of the public health emergency the following month. The announcement halted the federal policy that allowed people to stay on Medicaid, even if they were no longer qualified. 

Now, Connecticut is in its 12-month unwinding process, disenrolling people from Medicaid who lost eligibility during the pandemic. In turn, many are looking for other health insurance options, such as the Access Health CT exchange.

“In the environment where Medicaid disenrollment is happening right now, there’s a heightened awareness of how to make sure that people who may have been disenrolled from Medicaid appropriately find themselves on the exchanges now,” Forman said. 

According to Ruwet, the marketplace supports these transfers in coverage. The unwinding of pandemic-era policies likely contributed to higher enrollment for Access Health CT, as state health insurance marketplaces filled the gap for individuals looking for subsidized health insurance. 

She noted that many customers started the Open Enrollment cycle in May 2023 on Access Health CT. 

“A lot of people were coming off of Medicaid but didn’t qualify for an employer option,” Ruwet said. 

Spreading the word

Every year during the Open Enrollment period, the state organizes a large marketing and outreach campaign to encourage insurance applications. 

Beginning in the spring of 2023 and through the Open Enrollment period, Access Health CT has hosted daylong outreach and enrollment fairs to offer free, in-person enrollment help for individuals at risk of losing coverage during Medicaid unwinding.

The organization also says that it has trained and licensed 50 new health insurance brokers through its “Broker Academy,” a program in which the state provides free training and covers licensing exam costs for prospective health insurance brokers. The brokers work statewide to help insurance applicants compare insurance plans and navigate the application process, including at outreach events, Access Health CT wrote in a news release. 

The organization attributes increased enrollment, in part, to these targeted advertising and recruitment efforts. Access Health CT’s Health Equity and Outreach team also specifically targets underserved communities, Ruwet said. 

According to Ruwet, many of the communities that Access Health CT targets have historically lacked access to affordable healthcare. The team works to reduce racial health disparities by promoting the marketplace in these communities and offering them the tools for enrollment, she said.

“We partner with over 2,000 community partners throughout the entire year,” Ruwet said. “We work with a lot of nonprofits that are already in communities that people already go to and kind of trust.” 

These organizations include local community health centers and other nonprofits that provide assistance services. Ruwet noted Access Health CT trains workers at these organizations not only to spread awareness about the marketplace but also to help people directly enroll in health care coverage. 

“It takes the dedication and hard work of many to achieve these enrollment numbers,” said James Michel, the CEO of Access Health CT, in a news release. “I am proud to work with people who believe in our mission and understand the importance of health insurance coverage for everyone in Connecticut.”

The Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010.

Correction, Feb. 12: This article has been amended to correct what were mostly typographical errors.

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On Nov. 14, the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics hosted a community forum in Marsh Lecture Hall and on Zoom to discuss Connecticut’s Bill on medical aid-in-dying, or MAID. Over 260 people attended in person or on Zoom. Panelists Stephen Latham, director of Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Thaddeus Pope, bioethicist and professor at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law and Jules Good, a disability justice activist and policy analyst, provided insight about MAID from various angles including national trends, international and ethical trends and opposition. 

After the event, the News spoke with Joan Cavanagh, an advocate against MAID, who criticized the panel for its lack of viewpoint diversity. 

The forum opened with remarks from Connecticut State Representative Josh Elliot who emphasized the importance of listening to advocates from every side of the issue. 

“What we should be getting from this process is the strongest bill possible that protects people who are at deficits within the medical community, but also supports people who are looking to ensure that they have self-determination when it comes to their bodily autonomy,” Elliot said. 

Eliot was one of the lead sponsors during the 2023 Connecticut General Assembly supporting a bill that would have legalized MAID in Connecticut if passed. This bill made it farther than ever before in the House, advancing out of the Public Health Committee, but failed to advance out of the Judiciary Committee. 

Each speaker on the panel had 15 minutes to outline their positions on MAID, followed by a question and answer section with questions from the audience. 

The first speaker, Thaddeus Pope, a law professor and bioethicist began by providing listeners with general data about MAID. 

In the failed Connecticut legislation, in order to qualify for MAID, the patient would have to be 21 years old, have decisional capacity and be diagnosed with a terminal illness. The patient also would have to be the one to administer the lethal prescription. 

Patients would have to pass multiple rounds of screening with a prescribing physician, a consulting and a mental health physician. Even after going through this meticulous process, Pope said, an estimated third of the patients would ultimately choose not to take the lethal prescriptions. 

Advocates for MAID argue that it provides “death with dignity,” Pope explained. With this logic, he explained, as the burden of terminally ill patients’ lives outweighs the benefits, they want to avoid excessive suffering by giving patients the agency to control the timing and manner of their deaths. 

Jules Good, a disabled activist and policy analyst, joined over Zoom with an opposing viewpoint. Good described the dangers of instituting MAID, which they call assisted suicide. 

“In a healthcare system with so many clear barriers for marginalized peoples, a policy of assisted suicide is inherently dangerous,” Good said. “Not being able to afford care, not being able to access care, should not be reasons that people are choosing to end their lives prematurely.” 

Good said they believe that normalizing assisted suicide allows a broken healthcare system to “escape culpability for its systemic failures” leading to many people ending their lives unnecessarily. 

Latham said he prefers the term physician-assisted suicide and echoed many concerns that Good raised about the practice. He began by comparing Belgium and the Netherlands’ standard for MAID of irremediable suffering to the proposed Connecticut bill’s stricter standard of being terminally ill — meaning that person is already dying. 

Latham also addressed common concerns applicable to Connecticut that he said many people had regarding the passing of MAID in Oregon, the first state to legalize the practice. He said that many people worried that MAID would incentivize the healthcare system to provide low-quality care to people with low income in Oregon, thereby eliminating “inconvenient patients.” 

“Exactly the opposite happened,” Lantham said. “The people that used these programs were overwhelmingly insured, white and educated.” 

After the panelists spoke for their allotted 15 minutes, organizer Lori Bruce facilitated a Q&A session for panelists to answer questions from the live and online audiences. Questions ranged from comparing MAID to other end-of-life options such as euthanasia and palliative sedation to concerns about potential loopholes or issues the Connecticut bill may pose. 

After the forum ended, Brittany Fleck, an in-person attendee, told the News she was surprised by the level of debate.  

“I was not expecting it [the forum] to be political at all,” Fleck said. She added that the discussion was “riveting” but that she didn’t expect it to be “as intense.” 

Joan Cavanagh, a member of Progressives Against Medical Assisted Suicide, said that she was disappointed the forum had two speakers in support of MAID and only one opposed. 

She shared emails with the News showing that Bruce initially agreed to have one speaker from Second Thoughts CT and one from Progressives Against Medical Assisted Suicide on the panel as well but withdrew the offer on Oct. 11. 

“At that point, it became even clearer that this was mainly a discussion to talk about how to make the bill “better” or more “acceptable” and thus more likely to pass, not the objective educational forum that was being claimed,” Cavanaugh told the News. 

When asked about the viewpoints of the forum’s speakers, Bruce disagreed with the characterization of the event as pro-MAID. She said the three speakers were chosen so that Pope could speak on national trends, Latham on international trends and ethics and Good as an opposition figure.

Panelists demonstrated open-mindedness to one another’s line of thinking. For instance, all panelists agreed that some kind of training — credentials, certification requirements or a training program — would help ensure the safe use of MAID. 

In 1994, Oregon approved Measure 16, a Death with Dignity Act ballot initiative, becoming the first U.S. state to legalize medical aid-in-dying.

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Until then, the patient said she had avoided crying in a room with the male doctor she had just seen, according to Krueger. Then, on her own with Krueger, Krueger said the patient felt comfortable enough to express herself.

For Krueger, this instance was a prime example of how female doctors can have different relationships with their patients than male doctors.

“We spend a lot more time emotionally supporting our patients, which is how we build trust,” Krueger said. “That’s an example of why I might have a longer [visit] than a male physician, because they walk in the room and they’re getting right to it.”

Women physicians tend to spend more time with their patients than their counterparts, said Ted Melnick, an associate professor of emergency medicine and biostatistics at the School of Medicine. 

Physicians are largely paid for the services they conduct and not the amount of time they spend with patients, Melnick said. As a result, female physicians, by standard billing codes, are often paid less than male doctors, according to Melnick.

Research suggests that male physicians make far more than their female counterparts — with some estimates suggesting as much as an average of $2 million over their careers. 

A recent Yale study published in mid-October found that for general internal medicine physicians, changing policies about doctor’s productivity and medical billing could limit the wage gap between male and female physicians. 

By studying doctors in the northeast United States from August 2018 to June 2021, the report also found that the changes could increase overall physician productivity. 

“The ultimate goal is to pay physicians not based on the services that they provide, but based on their value,” said Krueger, who was not involved in the study.

The recent study evaluated the impact of a 2021 policy change in billing, called the evaluation and management coding regulations. Issued by the American Medical Association and the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, the policy update compensated doctors based on their time speaking with a patient, rather than just the number of procedures they conducted.

The report found that, while female doctors had over 22 percent fewer visits than males, their visits were 15 percent longer than their counterparts. 

“Historically, E/M codes were attached to procedures that were more valuable or compensated at a better level than things that require cognitive ability,” said Jason Hockenberry, the department chair of health policy at the School of Public Health. “The physicians who were engaged in more of the brain work were not necessarily doing things that were … lucrative from a financial standpoint.”

The study found that policy changes increased female doctors’ calculated productivity value by 17 percent. 

The research found that male doctors’ productivity also climbed by 10 percent.

“The new policy is actually helping everyone, especially for female physicians,” said Huan Li GRD ’27, the study’s first author and a doctoral student in computational biology and bioinformatics. 

The policy changes also encourage physicians to spend more effort and time on patients, Li said.

For Krueger, building positive patient-physician relationships can be “really valuable” in the long term. The trust a physician can build with their patients translates to better outcomes, she added, whether by helping them adhere to medication plans or stick to a diet.  

“Women physicians tend to have better outcomes,” said Melnick, the study’s senior author. “If you take the time to do preventive screening, you can catch things early on, and potentially treat them before they have complications for an individual patient.” 

In addition to longer clinical visits, the study also notes that female physicians have generally been found to spend longer on asynchronous work, such as updating electronic health records or responding to messages. 

At first, Melnick said, the development of electronic health records was meant to improve patient safety and data sharing. But the actual user experience and the burden of using the system, he said, are “far from ideal” for health care providers. 

For Jason Hockenberry, it is a technology issue: the quirks of new software and the electronic health record are “not easy” and have a challenging learning curve, he said. Starting to compensate physicians for their time responding to messages and acclimating to new software, Melnick said, can lead to a win-win situation. 

According to Melnick, billing based on time rather than number of visits could also encourage providers to better communicate with their patients — often asynchronously, via messaging on platforms like MyChart.

“Policy change around building messaging your doctor into the compensation model would be another step in the right direction,” says Melnick. “Right now, it’s seen as such a burden because it’s added on top of already really busy hectic schedules.”

Krueger said that physicians are not often paid for their time spent responding to messages. 

For female physicians like Krueger, this can often lead to a challenging work-life balance.

“The last time that I looked, I was getting among the most requests and messages of any other physician in the practice,” Krueger said. “I have a lot of trouble balancing the demands of my life as a mother with three children and the demands of work.”

The study also recommended investing in medical scribes — employees who can help physicians update the EHR and take notes during visits — could also improve physician productivity.  

For female physicians who take detailed notes, scribes could help alleviate the burden of cumbersome documentation on the EHR. 

“If we have scribes, we would not have to spend even more time after the visit, you know, at night in our pajamas on our computers, finishing the charts,” Krueger said.

Even though the study only looked at a single network of physicians, the researchers the News spoke with said they believe that it still offers valuable insights into how policy changes affirm the value of the work that women physicians perform.

The School of Medicine admitted its first female student in 1916. 

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Founded by Sandra Springer, a professor of medicine at the School of Medicine, and her team, the “Integrated Mobile Opioid Treatment and Infectious disease cOordinated care in your Neighborhood,” also known as “InMOTION,” aims to bring a functioning pharmacy to people’s homes and make health care more accessible to Connecticut residents. 

With the van, Springer said that she and her team hope to offer an additional healthcare resource between providers in existing health systems and patients in their homes. 

“What we really are trying to do is build bridges and linkages,” Springer said. 

In 2022, Springer, who primarily researches HIV and AIDS, won the Avant-Garde Award Program for HIV and Substance Use Disorder Research from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The award gave her a grant to research new ways to treat people with HIV, hepatitis C and substance use disorders. Springer said she sought to find a more holistic and accessible solution. 

The van will offer a pharmacist, community health outreach workers, telehealth clinicians and a dispensary. 

According to Osama Abdelghany, a lead pharmacist on the project, the van will be able to dispense and prescribe medications, optimizing drug therapy for patients. 

“Pharmacists have always been the most accessible health care providers,” Abdelghany said. “If you think of COVID days when people needed medication to treat or vaccines, retail pharmacies were the go to. Mobile pharmacy will add an innovative dimension to pharmacy care.” 

Abdelghany noted that some patients face transportation, financial and language barriers to accessing quality healthcare, even in their own communities. 

Abdelghany said that the van will help patients who struggle to face these challenges. 

“Some patients don’t even know how to navigate our health care and find support,” Abdelghany said. “The mobile pharmacy would be a game changer.” 

Springer said that the van will provide more than short-term medical care, creating a mobile hub that assists patients in many ways. The van will house community health outreach workers who can educate patients on potential medical and other resources, Springer told the News. 

“[The van] is about trying to treat the whole person and bringing services to them that may include other things outside of HIV, including blood pressure care and helping with housing applications,” Springer said. 

Other community health vehicles, such as the Yale Community Health Van, currently offer medical services, but can only provide limited pharmaceuticals, according to Frederick Altice, the creator of the Yale Community Health Van.

Altice added that Project InMOTION also may help decrease the stigma surrounding health care. 

“This is really meeting them where they are, at a time when they might be accessible to do this work and get the care that they need,” Altice said. “And it reduces the opportunity for stigma, because it’s saying, ‘we are here for you.’”

Springer and her team worked with Connecticut legislators to pass a law allowing pharmaceuticals to be dispensed beyond their designated storefronts. 

General Assembly passed the law in June 2023. 

“The legislation permits pharmacies to operate outside of licensed premises that they were originally intended for,” said Rodrick Marriott, the director of the Connecticut Drug Control Division. 

With this legislation, Project InMOTION now can grant people access to pharmacies despite where patients live or transportation issues they face, according to Springer. 

This legislation still puts a limit on what drugs the pharmacists can dispense, including controlled substances, according to Abdelghany. He said that buprenorphine, an FDA approved medication to treat opioid use, is restricted. In order to overcome this legal barrier, the team said that they would have to change federal, not state, law. 

“We are working with the DEA to change the regulations and allow us to stock and dispense controlled substances, which will be very important to this patient population,” Abdelghany said.  

In the meantime, Heather Goodwin, a pharmacist who will work with the van, said that pharmacists in the van can still send prescriptions of buprenorphine to brick and mortar pharmacies for delivery options. 

Springer was one of two researchers to win the Avant Garde Award Program for HIV and Substance Use Disorder Research in 2022. 

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By utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and longitudinal data on teens’ drinking habits, psychiatry professor Sarah Yip and her team found that different brain network patterns might help anticipate current and future drinking risk for adolescents. 

For years, researchers were restricted to observing isolated brain regions rather than how brain cells connect and work together, Yip said. Now, access to machine learning and the ability to compile large amounts of data have allowed scientists to gain a deeper understanding of how the brain functions. 

“It allows us to simultaneously test all possible hypotheses,” Yip explained to the News. “Not only are we generating predictions of someone’s future alcohol use, but in doing so, we are also identifying the connections that are the basis for these behaviors.” 

Yip’s study included 1,359 adolescents from the IMAGEN consortium, a longitudinal study conducted in Europe that periodically measured participants’ brain activity when they were 14-years-old and, again, at 19-years old. The researchers also conducted behavioral assessments — looking at the participants’ drinking habits — at ages 16, 19 and 23.

“This was an unprecedented size at the time, especially with this age group,” said Sarah Lichenstein, an associate professor of psychiatry and one of the co-authors of the article.

Their analysis suggests that there are at least two notable neural pathways related to predicting alcohol use: the inhibitory and the reward pathways. 

During adolescence, both these pathways undergo intense development, experts say.

“That’s why adolescence is this classic time period of risk-taking, whether that be experimenting with drugs of abuse or even new social groups,” Yip said.

The inhibitory pathway, Yip said, is the “brake system” of the brain, whereas the reward pathway signals “go.” If a teen’s reward pathway is more developed than their inhibitory pathway, they are more likely to pursue risky behaviors such as drinking, according to the study’s findings. 

The study also suggests that these two pathways capture important sex differences in adolescent brain development that could explain differences in their drinking behavior.

The report also found that patterns in the inhibitory pathway could determine the likelihood of adolescent males engaging in underage drinking.

According to psychiatry professor Sarah Liechtenstein, the higher likelihood of risky underage drinking behavior in boys might be due to the lack of development of their inhibitory brain development as compared to girls. Brain development in girls tends to happen earlier than in boys, Liechtenstein said.

“We know that adolescent brain development progresses at different rates between boys and girls,” she said. 

In the future, machine learning models that use brain connections to predict drinking habits might be possible, the researchers told the News. But for now, they said, the research is not at the point to draw comprehensive, accurate predictions. 

“The goal of the machine learning approach is to generate a prediction in unseen data, which means that the model you build is much more rigorous,” Yip said. “Right now, we are using advanced predictive models to understand biological mechanisms.” 

While machine learning can offer insight into fundamental biological systems, they are often limited by an unrepresentative dataset. For example, the IMAGEN consortium that the study used was primarily made up of white Europeans. 

But ongoing longitudinal studies can help increase the diversity of the data. Lichenstein said that the IMAGEN study is “a precursor” to more longitudinal studies, such as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development, or ABCD, study. 

The ABCD study currently measures the development of nearly 12,000 children starting at the age of 9 and into adulthood. Compared to previous studies, Liechtenstein added, the ABCD study is larger and more representative of the United States population.   

According to David Fiellin, the director of the Program of Addiction Medicine at Yale who was not involved in the study, the results can help researchers learn more about the biological foundations of addiction in the brain.

Along with ongoing clinical developments, he said, the results could help scientists develop individualized treatments for people struggling with substance abuse. 

“Oftentimes, interventions are more effective in some individuals and less effective in other individuals, and so we end up with an average result,” Fiellin said. “This type of work really helps us think through why these interventions may work in certain subpopulations — perhaps differentiate by age or by sex. We’re developing and modifying and adapting interventions for specific populations over time.”

According to the 2021 national survey on drug use and health, 13.4 million youth between the ages of 12 and 20 reported that they have had at least one alcoholic drink in their lives. 

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