If you're in health policy or medicine and confused about what to do with all the recent DiD innovations -- or curious about their adoption in the medical literature -- @brownbiostatistics.bsky.social PhD student Shuo Feng has you covered!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Amazed that this is still written in NYT in 2025.

With RCTs, we would have better evidence on acetaminophen in pregnancy with fewer individuals exposed. Why are we forcing everyone to experiment and not learning from it?

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/h...

Back from travels to share some Highland cows and our write-up about pregnancy research in Stat!

www.statnews.com/2025/08/12/p...

I recently experimented to see whether ChatGPT could be used to generate misleading anti-vaccine information, particularly about autism.

I was not heartened by the results...

Also important to note -- considerable racial disparities in both maternal and infant health have persisted over the past 25y.

So overall, amidst reasons for optimism with respect to trends, we shouldn't lose sight of work still to do. 4/n

@robbieparks.bsky.social +Seth Flaxman

And once we accounted for this effect, maternal mortality was flat...until COVID-19. Then, the change -- particularly during the Delta wave -- was real...and drastic, about doubling maternal mortality. 3/n

In work led by Robin Park (@ox.ac.uk), we used staggered difference-in-differences to examine the impact of reporting changes. These showed a sudden and drastic effect of the pregnancy checkbox on mortality as it was rolled out across states. 2/n

Has maternal mortality been increasing in the US?

Previous reports have noted a drastic increase in US maternal mortality. This was largely among "cause unspecified" deaths, leading to suggestions that some or all of these trends may be driven by changes in reporting.

We took a closer look. 1/n

Proud of Shuo Feng's research highlighted at Brown's Public Health Research Day --
"How Do We Know It Works? A Test-Driven Development Framework for Large Language Model-Supported Coding of Disease Simulation Models"

www.brown.edu/news/2025-04...