Healthy Communities Online

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome Dr. Ken Duckworth, Medical Director for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the nation’s largest grassroots organization addressing mental health issues. They discuss causes behind the growing problem of anxiety, depression, suicide and the opioid use disorder, and viable solutions to address the gap in access to mental health care through better screening, telehealth and better training of primary care clinicians.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with former Pennsylvania Congressman and three-star Navy Admiral Joe Sestak on his late entry into a run for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He shares his expertise on cybersecurity and threats to American health data, the need to move slowly towards any version of Medicare for All, and the promise of the Veterans Health Administration to meet growing gaps in rural health needs.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome a giant in the world of primary care transformation, Dr. Tom Bodenheimer, Co-Director of the Center for Excellence in Primary Care at the University of California San Francisco. They discuss Dr. Bodenheimer’s “Ten Building Blocks for High-Performing Primary Care” which offers essential guidelines for improving primary care practices and patient health outcomes through better use of teams, data, health coaching and reducing administrative burdens in the clinical setting.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, Chair Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California at San Francisco, on a National Academy of Sciences Committee she recently chaired on the social determinants of health. She discusses their ground-breaking report on how to incorporate social care into health care, shifting the American health system towards better management of upstream causes of poor health.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Diana Bianchi, Director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the NIH, the largest funder of health research in the world. She oversees a $1.5 billion budget conducting research in all phases of child health from maternal and reproductive health, to infant diagnostics, adolescence into adulthood, and all people with intellectual disabilities.