Conversations On Health Care

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Steven J. Stack, President of the American Medical Association. Dr. Stack addresses the medical profession's ongoing transformation with health IT and meaningful use, ICD-10 adoption and the need to redesign medical training to meet 21st century challenges in the health profession.

This week, Mark and Margaret speak with Susannah Fox, Chief Technology Officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Ms. Fox presides over the HHS Idea Lab and Health Datapalooza, where tech innovators and health policy makers come together to create solutions to healthcare's biggest problems. She previously served for 14 years as Director of the Internet and Life Project at Pew Research Center, analyzing health impacts of an increasingly internet-connected populace.

This week, Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Tom Frieden, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since 2009. Dr. Frieden discusses the most pressing challenges at the CDC, including antibiotic-resistant infections, the opioid abuse epidemic, and the recent Ebola epidemic, as well as efforts underway to combat these public health threats.

This week, Mark and Margaret speak with Sean Cavanaugh, Deputy Administrator and Director of the Center for Medicare at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. He is responsible for overseeing the regulation and payment of Medicare fee-for service providers, privately-administered Medicare health plans, and the Medicare prescription drug program. Medicare provides health coverage to 50 million elderly and disabled Americans, with an annual budget of over $550 billion.

This week, Mark and Margaret speak with Dr. Eric Green, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, the world's largest organization dedicated solely to genomics research. Dr. Green was on the team that mapped the human genome and talks about new initiatives at NIH to create better platforms for storing and sharing big data in this new era of scientific research.

This week, Mark and Margaret speak with Dr Kenneth Brigham, cofounder and past director of the Emory/Georgia Tech Predictive Health Institute, on the future of predictive health. They discuss the use of genomics, biometrics, and nanotechnology to identify disease risks early in life and perhaps prevent the future onset of disease.

This week, hosts Mark and Margaret speak with Harvard professor Dr. C. Michael Gibson, Founder and Chairman of WikiDocs.org, an open source website designed to facilitate collaborative authoring of medical content within the international community of healthcare professionals.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Jim Daley, Director of IT for BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina, and Immediate Past Chair of the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange or WEDI, a leading authority on the use of health IT to improve health care delivery and efficiency. Mr. Daley discusses the industry challenges of switching to ICD 10 coding for health billing, and why the switch is so vital to improving outcomes.

This week hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. William Dietz, Director of the Sumner M. Redstone Center for Prevention and Wellness at the Milken Institute of Public Health at George Washington University. Dr. Dietz is an internationally recognized expert on nutrition, prevention and obesity. He talks about the threat to public health and the economy posed by the obesity epidemic and efforts to combat the problem.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Leah Binder, Chief Executive Officer of the Leapfrog Group, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving safety in the hospital setting. She discusses the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and the Hospital Safety Score which coalesce patient safety data to rank hospitals for quality and safety across the country.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Margaret Anderson, Executive Director of FasterCures, an action tank dedicated to saving lives by speeding up and improving medical research systems. They discuss the ongoing threat to NIH research due to funding reductions, but also the game-changing potential of new technologies and increased patient engagement to advance biomedical research.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein, President and CEO of the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University and Editor-in-Chief of Psychiatric News, the journal of the American Psychiatric Association. He discusses their recent publication, "Understsanding Mental Disorders" which is a layperson's guide to diagnoses listed in the DSM-5.

This week, Hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Glenn Steele, President and CEO of Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, a physician-led, integrated health system serving 2.8 million patients across 44 counties. Dr. Steele discusses Geisinger’s integrated health services organization lauded for its innovative care delivery models and cost containment strategies that have yielded better outcomes and high-value care.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Larry Chu, anesthesiologist and Professor at the Stanford School of Medicine. He is also Founder and Executive Director of Stanford Medicine X, a yearly conference created to bring providers, patient groups and designers together to catalyze the development of patient-centered health technologies.

This week, Mark and Margaret speak with Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, having held the same position under former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He is also Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and is co-founder and Chief Strategist of the Millennium Promise Alliance. Professor Sachs is widely considered to be one of the world's leading experts on economic development and the fight against poverty. His work on ending poverty, promoting economic growth, fighting hunger and disease, and promoting sustainable environmental practices, has taken him to more than 125 countries.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Robert Wachter, Associate Chair of the Department of Medicine at U.C. San Francisco. He is considered the founder of the "hospitalist" movement and is author of The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age which examines challenges being experienced in the rapid transition to digital medicine.

This week, Mark and Margaret speak with Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, founder and director of The Civic Engine, which assists civic leaders in strengthening the economic divers of health in communities. A physician, data scientist, and former Director of Occupational and Evironmental Health for the City of San Francisco, Dr. Bhatia has spent his career championing economic and environmental justice for low-income workers and families. Dr. Bhatia recounts the trajectory of this work, from the use of health impact assessments for advocacy for minimum wage increases and paid sick days laws to the deployment of environmental inspectors to monitor and enforce labor standards.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. John Lumpkin, Sr. VP and Director of Targeted Teams at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Dr. Lumpkin runs the RWJF project targeting childhood obesity and talks about the myriad strategies aimed reducing the obesity epidemic among the nation's children.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Henry J. Aaron, the Bruce and Virginia MacLaury Senior Fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. He analyzes the case before the Supreme Court, King versus Burwell, which challenges the legality of the tax subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, and the potential impact of the High Court's decision.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Sherine Gabriel, Dean of the Mayo Medical School at the prestigous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, as well as a new medical school to be opened in Arizona. Dr. Gabriel talks about shifting their patient-centered medical training to incorporate 21st century needs including genomics, social determinents of health, and prevention.