Healthy Communities Online

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Vindell Washington, National Coordinator for Health IT at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the agency’s program to shift the health care industry from paper to electronic health records. Dr. Washington discusses the agency’s strategic plan for advancing those goals and for accelerating the creation of universal standards for health information exchange and the promotion of interoperability.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Neel Shah, Asst. Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Harvard Medical School and Founder of Costs of Care, a global NGO dedicated to helping delivery systems provide better care at lower costs. He’s also the co-author of “Understanding Value Based Care” which seeks to promote cost awareness in the medical profession, starting with medical school.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with John Wilbanks, Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit collaborative of network partners seeking to transform biomedical research through the use of openly shared data. Mr. Wilbanks has been advocating for the open science movement as well as for the creation of an infrastructure that will support the free flow of biomedical data to scale up research efforts.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Paul Sonnier, social entrepreneur and creator of The Story of Digital Health, a free online resource for digital health professionals. He is also the founder of the Digital Health Group on LinkedIn which has 50 thousand members worldwide, as well as 30 thousand Twitter followers, providing a platform for information sharing among digital health advocates.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. David Shulkin, Under Secretary for Health at the US Department of Veterans Affairs. Dr. Shulkin was selected to transform the largest health system in the country, serving the health needs of some 9 million veterans in all 50 states.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Charles Jaffe, CEO of HL7 International, a global network of volunteer coders working to develop interoperability standards for health information technology. Dr. Jaffe discusses the challenges in achieving interoperability, and the need for more aligned policies that will support and incentive a robust health information exchange.