Risk adjustment is a critical component of health care reimbursement aimed at ensuring fair compensation on the basis of the characteristics of patients receiving care. Optimizing risk adjustment is not just a matter of improving efficiency or predictive accuracy; it is a crucial step toward achieving health equity by ensuring that resources are directed toward patients who need them most and reducing incentives to exclude or neglect high-risk patients. The authors reviewed available publications from PubMed and Google Scholar published between 2000 and 2025, as well as relevant news articles, policy documents, websites, and other sources related to risk adjustment and application areas. This process yielded 8 recommendations related to standardizing risk adjustment methods, promoting data interoperability, implementing strategies to enable more accurate and continuous reflections of patients' health status, integrating valid and reliable metrics into regular evaluation and feedback mechanisms, limiting "gaming" opportunities and incentives, creating valid ways to measure costs of caring for patients who are experiencing health care disparities and inequities and/or are disproportionately affected by social drivers of health, evaluating and leveraging advanced analytics and machine learning when able to improve risk adjustment models, and promoting research and implementation methods that combine elements of both prospective and concurrent risk adjustment. Implementation of these risk adjustment recommendations has broad implications for various entities in the health care ecosystem.

In 2017, the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation) working group defined the certainty of evidence as the certainty that the true effect lies on one side of a threshold or in a particular range. This definition has proved useful as the basis for rating certainty, facilitating the interpretation of the results for the target audience. However, the categorization of suggested thresholds and ranges as levels of contextualization led to inconsistencies between the initial and subsequent papers and has proved confusing for some GRADE users. Although considering context in choosing thresholds remains worthwhile, the GRADE working group will no longer use the categorization of contextualization. It will instead refer simply to chosen thresholds or ranges for determining the target of certainty rating.

Climate change is anticipated to continue to adversely affect public health, with heat stress the predominant threat. Accordingly, heat-related illness is predicted to increase as extremely hot days become more frequent. Heat stroke, the most serious heat-related illness, is a medical emergency that may be fatal if it is not promptly recognized, addressed with early and rapid cooling, and accompanied by multidisciplinary supportive care as clinically indicated. Heat stroke is a preventable illness that occurs in 2 distinct forms-classic and exertional-that have distinct demographic profiles and clinical courses but similar management paradigms.

In January 2025, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives' Budget Committee offered a list of possible spending reductions to offset revenue losses from proposed tax cuts. In May, the Committee advanced a bill incorporating several reductions on the list. The Committee estimated that the 6 largest potential Medicaid cuts (for example, work requirements for some Medicaid enrollees) would each reduce the federal government's Medicaid outlays by at least $100 billion over 10 years. On the basis of the Committee's estimates of savings; Congressional Budget Office analyses; and peer-reviewed studies of the coverage, financial, and health impacts of past Medicaid expansions and contractions, the authors project the likely effects of each option and of the House bill advanced by the Budget Committee in May. Each option individually would reduce federal Medicaid outlays by between $100 billion and $900 billion over a decade, increase the ranks of the uninsured by between 600 000 and 3 900 000 and the annual number of persons forgoing needed medical care by 129 060 to 838 890, and result in 651 to 12 626 medically preventable deaths annually. Enactment of the House bill advanced in May would increase the number of uninsured persons by 7.6 million and the number of deaths by 16 642 annually, according to a mid-range estimate. These figures exclude harms from lowering provider payments and shrinking benefits, as well as possible repercussions from states increasing taxes or shifting expenditures from other needs to make up for shortfalls in federal Medicaid funding. Policy makers should weigh the likely health and financial harms to patients and providers of reducing Medicaid expenditures against the desirability of tax reductions, which would accrue mostly to wealthy Americans.

REPRIEVE (Randomized Trial to Prevent Vascular Events in HIV) showed benefits of pitavastatin as preventive therapy for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) in people with HIV (PWH). In February 2024, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Panel for the Use of Antiretroviral Agents in Adults and Adolescents with HIV (ARV Guidelines Panel) developed statin therapy recommendations for PWH. These recommendations were issued in collaboration with representatives from the American College of Cardiology (ACC), the American Heart Association (AHA), and the HIV Medicine Association (HIVMA). This synopsis summarizes the development process, the recommendations, and how they supplement the AHA/ACC/multisociety cholesterol guidelines and outlines gaps in primary prevention of ASCVD for PWH.