Steven Merahn is a pediatrician, health care executive, writer, and advocate for human-centered, clinically integrated care. He serves as enterprise chief medical officer for Perimeter Healthcare, where he leads initiatives focused on children and adolescents with complex behavioral health needs, including autism, intellectual and developmental disabilities, and other neurodevelopmental conditions. He is also the founder of Child Insights, which works with service providers and the health policy community to design systems of care that promote children's developmental potential.
Throughout a career spanning public health, clinical practice, health system leadership, population health management, and value-based care, he has worked to improve outcomes for vulnerable populations across the life course. A Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, he serves on national committees focused on autism and developmental disabilities.
Dr. Merahn is the author of Care Evolution: Essays on Health as a Social Imperative and writes frequently on health care transformation, behavioral health, systems-based practice, and the human experience of care, including on his Substack. His recent scholarship includes "Treating Invisible Wounds: The Case for Trauma-Informed Care in Autism" in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and "Pediatric Residential Treatment as Early Intervention?" in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health. His work explores the intersection of medicine, policy, ethics, and storytelling.
You have witnessed it, probably this week. A stranger correcting another stranger’s behavior. A comment on someone’s parenting, posted for an audience of thousands. A heated exchange over a parking spot that somehow becomes a referendum on someone’s character. The neighbor who reports another neighbor’s hedge height to the township. The pile-on that turns a stranger’s bad day into a national referendum, complete with their employer tagged in the replies.
Correcting …
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What public shaming reveals about a loss of trust
The growing scrutiny of applied behavior analysis (ABA) within Medicaid is widely misunderstood within the behavior analytic community as an attack on the profession or its science. It is neither. The root cause is structural. Medicaid programs, whether state-managed or administered through managed care organizations, operate on fixed annual allocations called “premiums,” funded by a blend of federal and state dollars. Each child’s premium is essentially a predetermined budget meant …
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The Medicaid reckoning for applied behavior analysis
Every week, I explore with great interest the commentaries, viewpoints, perspectives, podcasts, social media posts, and other dispatches from my peers and colleagues who are seeking to explain and influence the state of both the health care professions and our systems of care.
With each reading, I find modern parallels to the published words of my late mentor, Dr. Carleton Chapman, a former dean of Dartmouth Medical School and one-time president …
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Bringing words to a knife fight: Why we’re losing the health care war
As a nation, we have committed to a social imperative for education — an aspirational vision, based on its broad social benefit, for universal literacy and numeracy of our citizens — as manifested in our systems of mandatory K-12 education.
While this vision remains a work-in-progress — there are significant inequities and differences of opinion as to the process and content of education — the shared value of, and responsibility for, …
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The social imperative of health
For a very long time, one of the most valuable business assets in New York City was a yellow cab taxi medallion. With recent value in the $1 million dollar range, ownership of the medallion was a virtual cash annuity, combined with equity growth (in 2004 medallion prices were in the mid $200,000 range and have increased in value 15% year over year in the 9 years since). As one …
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What the Uber of health care will look like
