Research is a vital part of the HPA minor...

1. The National Center For Health Statistics
This site is maintained by the National Center for Disease Control and contains a wealth of information about current health trends, federal statistics on health and historical data.

2. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services(CMS) is the financial arm of the department of Health and Human Resources health care programs (Medicare and Medicaid). Its home page will lead you to a wealth of information about these programs and general issues of health care financing. One especially interesting aspect of this site is the most up-to-date information on national health statistics.

3. An important source of information, studies and data concerning private health insurance can be found at the Employment Benefits Research Council.

4. For information and data about current trends in U.S. Medical Schools see the American Association of Medical Colleges homepage and its affiliate the American Council of Teaching Hospitals.

5. For a view of medicine from the standpoint of mainstream physicians see the web page of the American Medical Association. This site will also lead to the electronic version of the AMA flagship publication The Journal of the American Medical Association.

6. Hospital issues, data and breaking news can be found at the American Hospital Association.

7. To conduct literature searches for professional writings on medical topics (including much of health policy) select Medline at the Z Smith Renolds Library Database. If you are also interested in covering the bases on the economics front, you can access the economics literature database, ECONLIT, from the same database webpage .

8. For some other programs in Health Policy and for information on graduate opportunities in Health Policy and Administration see the sites at Duke, UNC's School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, and Harvard University.

9. Statistical Software: Allin Cottrell of the WFU Economics Department has written an open source code statistical package name GRETL (Gnu Regression, Econometric and Time series Library) that is free to download and fairly easy to use in Windows. Click here to download the package onto your own computer.

10. Professor Lawlor is currently engaged as the economist on two N.I.H.-funded projects at the Wake Forest Medical School.

- Healthy Living To Prevent Diabetes (HELP) is sponsored by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and is investigating a healthy diet and exercise intervention, to prevent pre-diabetes from developing in pre-diabetic subjects.

- Action For Health in Diabetes (Look Ahead) is a long term (11.5 year) study designed to test whether weight loss can reduce cardiovascular events among a large (N=5000) cohort of overweight and obese diabetics. This trial is also funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.