Healthy Communities Online

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Anand Parekh, Chief Medical Advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank committed to fostering bi-partisan solutions to America’s biggest challenges. He discusses their recent report, a first-of-its kind analysis, on how states are utilizing Federal dollars in different ways to battle the opioid crisis, examining interventions that are working.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Emily Barson, Co-Founder along with former CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt, of United States of Care, a non-profit, non-partisan organization seeking to advance access to affordable health care for all Americans,”putting health care above politics”. She talks about their focus on state-based innovations that are improving health care access, and about their Medicaid Buy-In effort seeking to assist states in creatively expanding Medicaid to cover more of their residents.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Donald Rucker, National Coordinator for Health IT at the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Rucker discusses recently announced rules requiring health providers and hospitals to make electronic health records available to consumers upon request to their smart phones, at no cost them, to give patients more control of their health information.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Susmita Pati, Chief Medical Program Advisor for the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University, founded by the legendary actor and PBS science show host who felt science and health professionals needed to learn better communication skills. The “Alda Method” applies traditional actors’ training like improvisation and other speaking techniques to improve the ability of health care and science professionals to better disseminate their complex information.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with David Houlding, Microsoft’s Principal Healthcare Lead and international expert on blockchain, AI and cybersecurity issues impacting health information technology. He discusses the challenges of keeping health data safe, while improving access to patients and clinicians, with a growing emphasis on blockchain, AI and the cloud to advance health data security capabilities.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Jitin Asnaani, Executive Director of the CommonWell Health Alliance which is on a mission to make a nationwide health data exchange a reality. They discuss the national network of payer, provider and EHR vendors joining the Alliance to advance interoperability across multiple electronic health record platforms with health data flowing seamlessly from patient to providers.