Research at the Intersection
of Bioethics and Policy for
Persons with Disability
Megan Morris, PhD, MPH, CCC-SLP, aims to identify
and address provider and organization-level factors that contribute
to healthcare disparities experienced by
patients with disabilities. She is a leading expert on the
documentation of patients’ disability status in the
Electronic Health Record and healthcare disparities
experienced
by patients with communication disabilities.
Dr. Morris is founder and director of the Disability Equity Collaborative, a community aimed at advancing
equitable care for patients with disabilities through
practice, policy and research.
Dr. Morris and Jennifer Oshita, MS, CCC-SLP recieved the Distinguished Professor of Health Equity Best Poster Presentation Award from the Society of General Internal Medicine at their 2023 Annual Scientific Meeting for their poster, Communication Disability Accomodation Services in US Healthcare Organizations.
The New England Journal of Medicine published Morris's perspective,"Death by Ableism," in January, 2023.
Caring for Adults With Significant Levels of Intellectual Disability in Outpatient Settings: Results of a National Survey of Physicians, by
Eric G. Campbell, PhD, and co-authors, is the first national data regarding U.S. physicians’ attitudes and experiences with caring for adults with significant levels of ID. The authors findings may lead to adoption of standards that improve goals of optimizing patient and provider satisfaction, and reducing health and healthcare inequities.
AAIDD, January, 2023
Dr. Lisa Iezzoni, MD, MSc, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Feranmi Okanlami, MD, MS, assistant professor at University of Michigan Medical School discussed a series of studies in which researchers pulled back the curtain on how doctors perceive disabled patients. In 2021, CBH Research Director, Eric G. Campbell, PhD, along with Dr. Iazonne and co-authors surveyed 714 US physicians in outpatient practices. They found that 35.8 percent reported knowing little or nothing about their legal responsibilities under the ADA, 71.2 percent answered incorrectly about who determines reasonable accommodations, 20.5 percent did not correctly identify who pays for these accommodations, and 68.4 percent felt that they were at risk for ADA lawsuits. Read more in Health Affairs>>
Dr. Iezzoni concludes by quoting the World Health Organization, that disability is just part of the normal human experience. At some point, everybody, with some modest exceptions, will experience some type of disability, whether it be aging-related hearing loss or mobility difficulties. This just needs to be recognized as not something that’s abnormal or something to kind of stigmatize, but just something to accept and understand and accommodate.
