Healthy Communities Online

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome Susannah Sirkin, Director of Policy at Physicians for Human Rights, an organization using the power of medicine and science to document human rights violations in conflict zones around the world. She discusses their recent report on Syria’s attack on its own health care system, the banning of land mines and their work documenting trauma experienced by refugees and asylum seekers here and around the globe.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Larry Levitt, Executive Vice President for Health Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation who looks at the differences in proposals from the Democratic presidential candidates. He looks at variations in the “Medicare-for-all” proposals, how it would impact consumers, and examines the shifting role of insurance companies in the ongoing health policy debate.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with former Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, now Senior Fellow at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, on ways to create effective health policy in this hyper-partisan era. He discusses successful strategies he deployed as a Democratic governor in a red state that might prove effective across the country and in Washington. 

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome OpenNotes founder Dr. Tom Delbanco on his movement to make clinicians’ notes visible to patients through their electronic health records. They discuss the early reluctance of clinicians to participate, the high level of satisfaction from patients gaining access to their notes, with 40 million patients now utilizing OpenNotes.

This week hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Bob Kocher, a partner at Venrock, a venture capital entity investing in health IT and health services startups. He also advised the Obama Administration on health policy economics. He talks about emerging trends and new alliances that are driving rapid innovation in health care, aimed at facilitating better primary care and behavioral health access, and facilitating home care.