Explore every episode of the podcast The Other 80
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dr. Francis Collins on the Human Genome Project, Faith, and the Future of Science | 09 Sep 2026 | 00:39:48 | |
Dr. Francis Collins served as NIH director for 12 years across three administrations (Obama, Trump, Biden), both Democrat and Republican. He brought enormous scientific vision to the role, along with a level of connection and humanity rare in any leader. A year and a half ago, he left NIH, not by his own choice. And now, he joins Claudia to ask: How do we make the case for future investments in science in a world of distrust? Dr. Collins and Claudia cover:
Dr. Collins says, for him, science and religion can walk hand-in-hand because they answer different questions: “Science is the right way to answer questions about the natural world, but it doesn't help you so much with other questions like is there a God? Why am I here? Why is there something instead of nothing? That's where faith, if you're gonna get answers at all, comes to the rescue of the silence of science. And I think it's exciting to be able to consider all those questions. And if, as it is now in my worldview, the natural world is the handiwork of a creator, then studying the natural world is also getting a glimpse of God's mind, which means science and faith are in fact connected to each other and the laboratory maybe is… And even if you want to say what you're doing in science is to uncover with awe things about creation, this feels like worship.” Relevant Links Read Vannevar Bush’s 1945 paper “Science, the Endless Frontier” See Dr. Collin’s 2003 Nature paper called “A vision for the future of genomics research” Find latest update on NIH’s All of Us Research Program Read Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Explore Braver Angels, the cross-partisan, volunteer movement Dr. Collins references Listen to Carrie Newcomer’s song “If Not Now” About Our Guest Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., is the former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As the longest serving director of NIH — spanning 12 years and three presidencies — he oversaw the work of the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world, from basic to clinical research. Dr. Collins is a physician-geneticist noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project, which culminated in April 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book. He served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH from 1993-2008. Dr. Collins' research laboratory has discovered a number of important genes, including those responsible for cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, Huntington's disease, a familial endocrine cancer syndrome, and most recently, genes for type 2 diabetes, and the gene that causes Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a rare condition that causes premature aging. Dr. Collins received a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Virginia, a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Yale University, and an M.D. with honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to coming to the NIH in 1993, he spent nine years on the faculty of the University of Michigan, where he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Collins was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2007 and the National Medal of Science in 2009. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Can states build a healthier health system? Maryland is trying with Meena Seshamani | 12 Aug 2026 | 00:35:52 | |
Today’s guest, Dr. Meena Seshamani, ran Medicare at CMS and is now Secretary of Health in Maryland. She is leading one of the country’s most ambitious health reform efforts: evolving Maryland’s all-payer model, expanding investment in primary care, and using data infrastructure to strengthen coverage and population health—all while navigating the implementation of HR1. In this conversation, recorded at Aspen Ideas Health, Meena makes the case that policy design matters, but implementation is where its promise is realized or lost. Meena and Claudia discuss:
Meena shares how Maryland is strengthening food systems using rural health transformation funding: “We are also taking rural health transformation dollars and investing in cold storage, food aggregators, and distribution hubs for our local Maryland farms, so that when we are doing outreach on healthy eating and providing nutritious food to people, that's actually coming from our local Maryland farms. So it's boosting the local economy in our rural areas as well.“ Relevant Links Maryland’s Total Cost of Care Model: Evaluation of the First Four Years Article on the impact of Maryland’s model How CRISP supports Medicaid redetermination The state’s Rural Health Transformation plan About Our Guest Meena Seshamani, MD, PhD serves as the Secretary of Health for Maryland in the Moore-Miller Administration, where she stewards a $20 billion health system that encompasses public health, Medicaid, disability, behavioral health, and 11 state-run hospitals. She leads the state’s mission to improve the health and well-being of all Marylanders through a focus on accessibility, affordability, and equity. Under her leadership, Maryland has emerged as a national laboratory for healthcare innovation. Dr. Seshamani successfully negotiated a first-of-its-kind, multi-billion dollar healthcare payment model with federal partners and secured $168 million in inaugural funding to transform rural health delivery. Her tenure is also marked by a proactive approach to public health, exemplified by ensuring broad vaccine access in the state through the creation of a landmark program providing free vaccines to uninsured and underinsured residents—codifying health security as a statewide priority. Prior to her cabinet appointment, Dr. Seshamani served as Deputy Administrator and Director of the Center for Medicare at CMS. There, she executed the most significant pharmaceutical reform in decades: the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation program, achieving $6 billion in first-year savings. Her work at CMS fundamentally shifted the Medicare model to value-based care by introducing payments for community health services, caregiver training, and navigating patient care, while simultaneously tightening accountability and oversight. A board-certified head and neck surgeon and an Oxford-trained health economist, Dr. Seshamani’s perspective is grounded in how health care policy and operations impact the real lives of patients. She previously served as Vice President of Clinical Care Transformation at MedStar Health, maintaining a surgical practice while leading large-scale system changes. A widely published author in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA, her insights are frequently sought by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and major news networks. Dr. Seshamani holds her MD from Johns Hopkins University and her PhD from the University of Oxford, where she was a Marshall Scholar. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| The CMS Innovation Center at 15: What worked, what didn’t, and the next big bets with Abe Sutton | 29 Jul 2026 | 00:35:36 | |
Fifteen years ago Congress created the CMS Innovation Center to test new ways of delivering quality care at lower costs. Since then, the Innovation Center has tested dozens of models - some have been successes, and many have not. Director Abe Sutton joins The Other 80 for a candid conversation about the Innovation Center’s record, its next chapter, and the big bets ahead. Abe identifies three features of successful models:
Abe says success should not be measured by how many models work, but by overall return on investment: “If we are taking bold bets, if we're trying to say, all right, let's back the next thing that could really transform care in a country and put the country on a more solid fiscal foundation while improving care and the affordability of care. Well, one thing that really was transformative and did that well may be worth the cost of running 20 things.” Relevant Links Read the CMS Accountable Communities Evaluation Access the GAO report evaluating the CMMI model from 2011-2024 Read the CMMI’s most recent Strategic Plan About Our Guest Abe Sutton serves as the Director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation and Deputy Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Before assuming this role in January of 2025, he co-founded two health service companies; Honest Health, which focuses on enabling primary care physicians, and Evergreen Nephrology, which focuses on enabling nephrologists. Sutton focused on health policy with the federal government from 2017 to 2019, serving at the National Economic Council, Domestic Policy Council and Department of Health and Human Services. In these roles, he coordinated health policy across the federal government, with a focus on the shift to paying-for-value within Medicare, increasing choice and competition in health care markets, and updating the federal government’s approach to kidney care. He holds a law degree from Harvard Law School and undergraduate degrees in political science, management, and health care management and policy from the Wharton School and the College at the University of Pennsylvania. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Rebuilding Primary Care with Rushika Fernandopulle | 17 Jun 2026 | 00:42:58 | |
Healthcare pioneer Rushika Fernandopulle joins us to discuss his new venture Liza and why this is the perfect moment to build new primary care models from the bottom up. Rushika argues that “shareholder value” has usurped the needs of patients in US healthcare, and that fundamental rethinking, not optimizing or tweaking at the edges, is needed. Rushika shares the ‘build principles’ for Liza:
Rushika argues that AI invites us to rethink healthcare based on abundance, not scarcity: “We've built our whole economy, all our processes with this assumption of scarcity, that there were a scarce number of human brains who could do things, right? Doctors, teachers, et cetera. And now all of a sudden that assumption has gone away. So we need to rethink from scratch how we build these systems. So that's what we're trying to do at Liza. Like, what if we started from scratch?” Relevant Links More information on LIZA Health The book Conscious Capitalism by John Mackey et al Podcast episode where Tim Ferris and Jerry Colonna talk about sabbaticals Article by Sara Riggare about living with Parkinson's and her image of blue and red dots About Our Guest Rushika Fernandopulle is a practicing physician who is the CEO of Liza Health, a startup building a new AI-enabled platform for Primary Care. He was the co-founder and CEO of Iora Health, an early innovator in Primary Care redesign which was acquired by Amazon in 2023. Prior to this, Rushika was the first Executive Director of the Harvard Interfaculty Program for Health Systems Improvement and Managing Director of the Clinical Initiatives Center at the Advisory Board Company. He is a member of the Schweitzer, Ashoka, Aspen, and Salzburg Global Fellowships, on faculty at Harvard Medical School. He serves on the boards of the Asian American Foundation, Families USA, and Premera Blue Cross, and is a member of the Lancet Commission for Person Centered Care. He earned his A.B., M.D., and M.P.P. from Harvard University, and completed his clinical training at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts General Hospital. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Drug Story: Thomas Goetz on Drugs, Diseases and The Medicalization of Everyday Life | 03 Jun 2026 | 00:40:26 | |
Does the history of drugs tell us something bigger about the world? That’s what former Wired executive editor and UC Berkeley Senior Impact Fellow Thomas Goetz is betting on with his new podcast Drug Story. He joins Claudia to talk about how big drug breakthroughs have shaped how we live and what it will really take to build health in our society. Thomas and Claudia dive into:
Thomas says the illusion of free will makes consumers feel like unhealthy choices are their choice alone: “There is some agency, like somebody decides to take a cigarette out of the pack. People decide whether to have a Coke instead of a glass of water or what have you. But there's also this vast machine, an invisible universe that is so powerful in compelling us from the commercials that are on our TV shows to the infrastructure of fast food in our neighborhoods. And it just is this easy inertia where oftentimes we don't actually have free will… We have much less free will than we think we do when it comes to things like what we eat, how we get our entertainment, where we live. There's a lot that is not really up to us and our choices.” Relevant Links Listen to Thomas Goetz’s podcast Drug Story About Our Guests Thomas Goetz is an award-winning science journalist and author. He has won National Magazine Awards (print and digital), Webby Awards, and FDA contracts. He created Drug Story as an Impact Fellow at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health. The former Executive Editor at WIRED, he has worked at The Wall Street Journal, Inc., and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and has written two award-winning books about technology and medicine. His writing has been selected for the Best American Science Writing and the Best American Technology Writing anthologies. He spent much of the past decade developing digital tools to help people make sense of prescription medications, including leading the development of openFDA for the Food and Drug Administration, and building an economic research team and editorial operations at GoodRx. You can reach him at thomas@drugstory.co Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| The ARPA for Philanthropy: Kumar Garg on Funding 'Big If True' Ideas in Science and Tech | 20 May 2026 | 00:36:44 | |
After spending time in the Obama White House, Kumar Garg came away with a toolset of skills to help drive change, spotlight good ideas and scale them. Now he’s applying those ideas to philanthropy. As the co-founders of Renaissance Philanthropy, Kumar and Tom Kalil have built an organization around a deceptively simple idea: What if philanthropy could help scientists, technologists, and innovators think bigger — and then actually fund the work at the scale required? Kumar and Claudia dive into:
Kumar’s intriguing ‘open notebook’ idea: “It's very valuable to me if a researcher has the equivalent of an open notebook. These are all the ideas… Here's my active research projects. Here's all the interesting sort of experiments I've done… you can imagine then sending an agent out and read[ing] people's open notebook.. it would be a way to discover people's work.” Relevant Links Learn more about Renaissance Philanthropy Get info on the Big If True Science Accelerator (BITS) See a photo of Kumar’s White House white board on Twitter About Our Guests Kumar Garg is the President at Renaissance Philanthropy. Kumar has helped to shape the science and tech landscape for almost two decades. Working with Eric Schmidt, he helped design and launch moonshot initiatives in education, provided early support to game-changing ideas and pioneers, and built ongoing multi-donor and multi-sector collaboratives. Prior to that, he helped set budget and policy priorities for the Obama Administration as part of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and drove progress on topics ranging from education and workforce issues, biotechnology, entrepreneurship, space, advanced manufacturing, broadband, nanotechnology, behavioral sciences, digital media, incentive prizes, and broader innovation policy. In particular, he led the Obama Administration’s efforts to bolster science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, including development of major budget and policy initiatives in the State of the Union to train 100,000 excellent STEM teachers and bring computer science to all K-12 students, development of the Educate to Innovate campaign with over $1 billion in in-kind and philanthropic investment, and creation of iconic events such as the White House Science Fair. Prior to his time in government, Kumar worked on behalf of parents and children seeking educational reform as an education lawyer and advocate. Kumar received a B.A. from Dartmouth College and a law degree from Yale Law School. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| The "Smart Shot": Halle Tecco on Aligning Mission & Margin for Massively Better Healthcare | 22 Apr 2026 | 00:30:51 | |
Halle Tecco is an investor, entrepreneur, and author of the new book Massively Better Healthcare. In this live conversation, she offers advice for aspiring health tech founders, reflects on why “hustle culture” needs to be kept in check, and makes the case that founders should become anthropologists of the problems they want to solve. Most importantly, she argues that today’s founders need to be “bilingual” — fluent in both healthcare and technology. Halle and Claudia cover:
Halle says there is lots of opportunity to build businesses in the healthcare industry, but you need to pick something you are passionate about: “It is extremely hard to be a founder. It is 10 times harder to be a founder in healthcare… you're working on what I think are the most important problems that we will be able to solve, but it's also really challenging. [Make] sure you're picking a problem that you're genuinely very passionate about solving. That will help drive you and be your North Star when things get inevitably very, very hard. “ Relevant Links Buy Halle’s book Massively Better Healthcare Listen to Halle Tecco’s Podcast “The Heart of Healthcare” Learn more about Rock Health Menlo Ventures report on the state of AI in healthcare About Our Guest Halle Tecco is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and podcast host passionate about fixing our healthcare system. She is the founder of Natalist, which was acquired by Everly Health in October 2021. Previously, Halle founded and ran Rock Health, and was also an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School, teaching the first MBA-level course on digital health investing. A proud first-generation college graduate, Halle earned an M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins University, an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, and a B.S. from Case Western Reserve University. She has served as a Board Member to the International African American Museum since 2018, and as an Advisor to the Harvard Medical School Department of Biomedical Informatics since 2014. Halle has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. She was named as one of Goldman Sach’s Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs and listed on the Forbes 30 under 30. She has spoken at the Aspen Ideas Festival, CES, TechCrunch Disrupt, and was a SXSW Keynote speaker. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Can robots save your life? Fred Khosravi on the ambitious plan to bring stroke care to everyone | 08 Apr 2026 | 00:32:06 | |
After moving to the US from Iran at age 17, entrepreneur and inventor Fred Khosravi went on to launch more than 20 companies and earn hundreds of patents. In this conversation, Fred reflects on the power of immigration, freedom, education and what it means to build a life in a new country. He shares how leaving Iran after the revolution shaped his willingness to take risks, his sense of purpose, and his entrepreneurial drive. Claudia and Fred also get into some of the biggest opportunities he sees ahead, from women’s health to the long-overdue shift from a healthcare system organized around visits to one centered on outcomes and connected care. This interview was recorded in person at the JP Morgan - Berkeley healthcare conference in Taipei. Fred and Claudia dive into:
Fred says strong regulation is the foundation, not a barrier, to America’s global leadership in biotech: “I happen to believe that the reason American medical technology and American pharmaceuticals are the most sought after in the world, if you can afford it, is because of the FDA. I like to say it's because of entrepreneurs like me, and it's because of everybody who's actually working so hard on it… We could not achieve the results that we're achieving around the world… If it weren't for the systems of standards and highest quality level thinking… that the FDA is bringing to the table.” Relevant Links Learn more about Imperative Care’s vision for treating stroke and other thromboembolic diseases About Our Guest Fred (Farhad) Khosravi is a Silicon Valley medical device entrepreneur who has held management and executive positions in both large and small medical technology enterprises over the last 30+ years. Throughout his career, he has been either the inventor or co-inventor for over 200 U.S. and worldwide granted and patent applications, making him one of the most prolific minds and leaders in the industry. However, Fred’s passion for improving people’s lives goes beyond the medtech field. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan think tank dedicated to providing strategic national security insights to help decision makers chart a course toward a better world; is a member of the Board of Directors at Spirit of America, a nonprofit that promotes private-sector support for the safety and success of our troops and the local people they want to help; and is a convening board member for Technology for America, a nonprofit for promotion of innovation as a way to engage public-private dialogue that benefit all Americans. Fred holds a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering and graduated cum laude with an M.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Tennessee Tech University. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Patient Agency in the Age of AI with Liz Salmi & Hugo Campos | 25 Mar 2026 | 00:42:09 | |
Patient innovators Liz Salmi and Hugo Campos join The Other 80 to discuss the evolving role of patients in healthcare, using the recent release of ChatGPT Health as a central lens. They delve into how AI is shifting the power dynamic by enabling greater patient agency and creating new expectations for health systems. Drawing on their personal experiences, including Liz's work with OpenNotes and Hugo's long struggle for access to his cardiac device data, they explore how technology can serve as a bridge for collaboration, rather than a source of conflict, between patients and clinicians. Claudia, Liz and Hugo talk about:
Liz says AI is surfacing the same reactions she saw around patients googling health information: “It makes me think of the Dr. Google era of when clinicians were like, ‘patients shouldn't go online and look for information about their own health because they don't know how to search accurately for their own health information’. And I think we're at this early stage of the tension between health systems wanting to still control how patients find their own health information, versus our own curiosity and exploration of digging into our own health information and… asking the questions that are important to us and then discovering the answers ourselves in our own journey.” Relevant Links Read Liz and Hugo’s paper on Critical AI Health Literacy Watch Hugo’s TEDx Talk on Fighting for the Right to Open His Heart Data Learn more about the patient data transparency movement at OpenNotes Read the full text of the 21st Century Cures Act About Our Guests Hugo Campos is an internationally recognized patient advocate, combining creative and technical expertise to promote participatory medicine and patient-centered, AI-enabled healthcare. Named a White House Champion of Change for Precision Medicine by President Obama in 2015, he advocates for patient rights and health data access while managing his own cardiac condition. Hugo serves on the NIH’s All of Us Research Program Steering Committee, co-leads patient engagement for PCORI’s THRIVE trial, and advises UCSF/UC Berkeley’s Computational Precision Health program. A TEDx Cambridge speaker, his advocacy has been featured in national media and scientific publications. Hugo lives in Oakland, California, with his husband, elderly father, and Memphis the cat. Liz Salmi is the Communications & Patient Initiatives Director for OpenNotes. In this role, Liz helps clinicians, hospitals and health systems understand through “the patient’s eyes” the changing nature of patient-clinician communication in an age of growing transparency. Her research areas of interest include: the effects of transparency on patient-clinician communication, stakeholder engagement, research dissemination, and the role of social media in patient-clinician-researcher collaborations. As a person living with a low grade malignant brain tumor, Liz is passionate about helping all people engage in their own health care by improving their experience as patients. Over the last 17 years she has been: a research subject; an advisor in patient stakeholder groups; a leader in “patient engagement” research initiatives; and an innovator, educator and investigator in national educational and research projects. In addition to her work with OpenNotes, Liz led the Brain Cancer Quality of Life Collaborative, a multi-stakeholder group dedicated to advancing science and improving the quality of life for people with malignant brain tumors. In fall 2021, members of the BCQoLC team (along with established investigators), were awarded a $12.8 million Center Grant from the National Cancer Institute to determine optimal methods for patient enrollment in a brain tumor registry. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Missing the Nobel Call with Fred Ramsdell | 11 Mar 2026 | 00:38:39 | |
Newly-minted Nobel laureate Fred Ramsdell joins Claudia to discuss his groundbreaking work on regulatory T cells, which act as the immune system's natural "brakes." His research aims to "reset" the immune system to cure autoimmune diseases (like rheumatoid arthritis and MS) moving beyond mere symptom management. Fred reflects on his new role as a science advocate, addressing the crisis of public trust in science and the need for greater diversity in biomedical research. During this conversation, recorded at the UC Berkeley/JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in Taipei, Claudia and Fred discuss:
Fred says he’s excited to see what other advances are possible in what he calls “the early innings” of scientific discovery: “As humans, we're really good at solving technological problems. If we know what the problem is, historically, we're pretty good at figuring out an answer. [We’re] pretty confident now that we know the problem in peripheral tolerance, that is the breakdown of our immune system recognizing our own tissues. Now we know what at least part of that problem is, we'll be able to engineer our way into a solution.” Relevant Links See more about Fred’s Nobel win and read the UCLA press release Fred’s Nobel prize lecture See Fred and his co-laureates accept their prize Read more about Fred’s 2025 co-laureates Mary E. Brunkow and Shimon Sakaguchi About Our Guest Fred Ramsdell, PhD, is a veteran biotechnology leader in immunology with nearly three decades of experience and was named a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. A co-founder of Sonoma Biotherapeutics, Dr. Ramsdell was the former Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) and current Scientific Advisory Board Chair of the Company. Dr. Ramsdell earned his doctoral degree in microbiology and immunology from the University of California, Los Angeles and holds a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and cell biology from the University of California, San Diego. Following a fellowship at the NIH, Dr. Ramsdell joined Immunex studying T cell activation and tolerance, with a focus on gene discovery and functional characterization. He later joined Darwin Molecular (which was later acquired by Celltech R&D) to establish the immunology program. Amongst other programs, he led the team that discovered and characterized FoxP3, a gene critical to the function of regulatory T cells. Dr. Ramsdell joined ZymoGenetics in 2004, where he led teams studying novel proteins with potential regulatory activity in lymphoid cells. In 2008, Novo Nordisk brought on Dr. Ramsdell to help establish the company’s new Inflammation Research Center in Seattle and lead the Immunobiology group. Prior to SonomaBio, Dr. Ramsdell was the CSO at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI) where he helped to build and advance multiple research programs from the inception of the Institute. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Breaking the Cycle of Homelessness with Kunal Modi | 25 Feb 2026 | 00:40:51 | |
When Mayor Lurie took office, San Francisco was spending nearly $1 Billion a year responding to homelessness, yet the number of people living unsheltered had not budged in years. In this episode, Kunal Modi, the city’s Chief of Health and Human Services, shares how the Lurie administration is tackling the intersecting homelessness, mental health and addiction crises. Rather than layering on new programs, the city is attempting something harder: redesigning how fragmented systems work together. Kunal and Claudia discuss:
Kunal reminds us that ending the cycle of homelessness is far more complicated than just finding housing: “This is more than a homelessness crisis, it's an intersecting homelessness, behavioral health, and drug addiction crisis that we need to bring our healthcare system and our social service system in closer alignment… We need to reorient our Public Health strategies to not only support those in crisis, but to think about the broader communities and neighborhoods.” Relevant Links
About Our Guest Kunal Modi is the policy chief of health, homelessness, and family services in San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s administration. In this role, he coordinates eight agencies, including the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, the Department of Children, Youth and Families and the Department of Early Childhood, while also serving as liaison to San Francisco Unified School District and City College. He brings extensive experience in cross-agency collaboration and reform, aiming to deliver compassionate, effective solutions for the city’s most pressing health, housing, and family needs. Before joining City Hall, he spent over 11 years as a partner at McKinsey & Company’s Bay Area office and previously served on the boards of Larkin Street Youth Services and St. Anthony’s Foundation. His educational background includes an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, an M.P.P. from Harvard Kennedy School, and a B.A. from Northwestern University. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Bending the Chronic Disease Curve with Sean Duffy | 11 Feb 2026 | 00:39:47 | |
Not many digital health companies go public. And even fewer do so with a model designed to fix what’s truly broken in U.S. healthcare: episodic, fragmented care that fails to support the behavior change required to manage chronic disease. Omada Health CEO Sean Duffy joins Claudia to discuss the company’s journey from scrappy startup to public company—and his biggest ambition for the future: bending the nation’s chronic disease curve, both in cost and in human suffering. Claudia and Sean talk about:
Sean says for Omada to actually shift what consumers pay out of pocket every month for their premiums we need to make big changes: “Affordability is the thing… That's the burden we're bearing as a country… And so, the only way to bring down healthcare costs are completely transformed care models. That's the only way… Thank goodness we're at a moment where those models are being supported and being scaled nationally. Thank goodness we're at a moment where technologies like AI can help add even more efficiency and help scale… Our only way out are different care models [that] leverage new technologies.” Relevant Links Access more info in Omada’s research library Get details on Omada Health’s S1 IPO Filing See the GLP-1 research Sean mentions: Omada members maintain weight loss after discontinuing GLPs Get more info on the CMS ACCESS model About Our Guest Sean Duffy co-founded Omada in 2011 with the aim of merging medical trends and cutting edge technology to revolutionize health care of chronic disease as we know it. Today, he proudly serves as CEO and has been instrumental in steering Omada toward global recognition, such as being hailed a potential “medical triumph” by The New York Times, and one of Fast Company’s 50 most innovative companies in the world. A longtime devotee of healthcare and technology, Sean also founded a largely automated lifestyle business around Excel Everest, the interactive Microsoft Excel training tool he created. He formerly covered healthcare innovation as writer and editor for Medgadget, a popular medical technology blog. As CEO of Omada, Sean cares deeply about honing the organization’s exceptional products, values-driven approach to healthcare, and the innovative ways in which primary care can continue to better humanity. More recently, Sean has been spending more and more of his free time learning how to build and fly first-person view drones. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Free Childcare for All with Elizabeth Groginsky | 28 Jan 2026 | 00:36:14 | |
In 2025, New Mexico made history as the first state in the nation to commit to free childcare for all families. Elizabeth Groginsky, who leads this effort, joins Claudia to discuss what Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has described as a “cradle-to-career education system”—and why investing early pays dividends from school readiness to family economic stability. Claudia and Elizabeth dive into:
Elizabeth underscores this is not only good social policy but also a smart financial investment: “If we believe the Heckman equation, if we believe the economists coming out of the Federal Reserve, this is your best investment. If it's a 7 % return, that's better than anyone's getting on any portfolio. It could be as high as a 13 % return… And so it's not going to be a question of ”How can we afford it?”, but “How can we not afford to invest in universal child care?”” Relevant Links
About Our Guest Elizabeth Groginsky has more than two decades of executive leadership experience administering public and private human service organizations at the national, state and local levels. She previously served as the assistant superintendent of early learning for the District of Columbia, a role she held for nearly five years where she administered a $160 million annual budget that funded programs to ensure equal access to quality services for the District’s most vulnerable children and their families. The District of Columbia was first in the nation in 2009 to pursue universal pre-K and today has the highest U.S. participation rate, with 85 percent of all 4-year-olds and 75 percent of 3-year-olds. She previously directed early childhood education for United Way Worldwide, where she helped expand the number of communities collecting and using population-based early childhood data; and she was the first executive director of the Early Childhood Data Collaborative, a national coalition to improve state policies and practices in the development and use of early childhood data system. Her experience with Head Start programs is extensive: She began as a family services coordinator, later administered a county program and then directed the Head Start Collaboration Office for Colorado. In Washington, D.C., she oversaw one of only eight state Early Head Start Child Care Partnership grants. Groginsky earned a master’s degree in social sciences from the University of Colorado at Denver and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Making Drugs More Affordable with Paul Markovich (Encore Episode) | 17 Dec 2025 | 00:24:58 | |
This week, we close out our three-part series on rethinking drug access and costs with a must-listen encore episode. After detailing the scope of the drug price crisis with Mark Cuban and how we can re-purpose drugs to treat rare illnesses with David Fajgenbaum, we turn to a leader who is actively changing the dynamic: Paul Markovich. Now the CEO of Ascendiun (the parent company of Blue Shield of California), Paul argues that healthcare affordability isn't just a patient pocketbook issue - it’s a massive economic crisis for the nation. In this episode, Paul and Claudia discuss:
Paul Markovich challenges healthcare leaders to shift from explaining high costs to being accountable for lowering them: “Almost everybody in the entire value chain, whether it's health plans or hospitals or all the way through, they want to explain why healthcare is so expensive and why there's this inflation rate as if that absolves them of any responsibility to make it different. And so, what I really want is accountability, and a level of accountability that doesn't exist yet in our industry, to say, 'Hey, we own this' ". Relevant Links Part 1: Listen to our episode “New Life for Old Drug with David Fajgenbaum” Part 2: Listen to our episode “Lessons in Disruption with Mark Cuban” Rethinking how Americans get affordable medications California’s new PBM reform law About Our Guest Paul Markovich is president and chief executive office of Ascendiun, a nonprofit corporate entity as part of the new parent to the family of organizations that includes Blue Shield of California. Paul Markovich was president and chief executive officer at Blue Shield of California, a nonprofit health plan with $25 billion in annual revenue, serving 6 million members in the state's commercial, individual, and government markets. Paul launched and led numerous initiatives to drive innovation and help reimagine health care, including funding support for a statewide provider directory to make it easier for Californians to find physicians and facilities in their plan; supporting the development of a statewide health information network for patients’ records, enabling more seamless and holistic care; and investing in a partnership with the California Medical Association to help physicians pilot new care delivery models and leverage technology. At Blue Shield, Paul previously served as chief operating officer (responsible for healthcare services, network management, e-business, marketing, product development, and customer operations). He was senior vice president of the large group and CalPERS business units. He led the company’s product development unit, introducing numerous products and services such as the first California Health Maintenance Organization to allow self-referrals to specialists and initiating online access to member benefits. He currently serves on the board of the Chicago-based Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, the national umbrella organization across the country. Together, these plans provide health coverage for more than 100 million Americans. Paul also serves on the board of America’s Health Insurance Plans. Paul is a North Dakota native and Rhodes Scholar with a master’s degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University. He is a graduate of Colorado College, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Political Economy and played Division I hockey. Source: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-markovich/ Stay Informed Sign up for The Other 80 Newsletter to receive a monthly update with reflections, news, events, jobs and funding curated for you by Claudia. Click here to sign up. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| Lessons in Disruption with Mark Cuban | 03 Dec 2025 | 00:43:00 | |
Investor and healthcare disruptor Mark Cuban joins The Other 80 to talk about his online pharmacy, Cost Plus Drugs, that is bringing affordable drugs with transparent markups to American households. Mark lays out his basic formula for taking overhead and complexity out of the US healthcare system by disaggregating huge vertical businesses and disintermediating middlemen. In this episode, Mark Cuban pitches:
Mark thinks the best way to make change is from outside the system: “What makes [Cost Plus Drugs] radical is when we started, everybody presumed and expected that we would work within the system. That we would partner with the big three wholesalers that control 98% of the sale of drugs - that we would partner with the big three PBMs that control 85% of prescriptions. And, we did the exact opposite because we knew they were the problem.” Relevant Links
About Our Guest Mark Cuban is an investor who lives for his family, his "Shark Tank" companies and the Dallas Mavericks. He is the owner of the 2011 World Champion Dallas Mavericks and bestselling author of "How to Win at the Sport of Business," and was an entrepreneur from the early age of 12 when he sold garbage bags door to door. Today, Cuban is the highly successful entrepreneur and investor with an ever-growing portfolio of businesses. A lifelong entrepreneur and investor, Cuban has started and built multiple industry-changing organizations including Costplusdrugs.com, which sells medications at industry low pricing with total cost transparency, which he founded with Dr. Alex Oshmansky. Named a winner of the GQ Men of the Year in 2006 and included in The New York Times Magazine's Year in Ideas, Cuban is recognized as being among the most influential people in both the cable and sports industries. He may be best known for his purchase of the Dallas Mavericks on Jan. 4, 2000. Under his leadership, the team's home games have become a total entertainment experience. Prior to his purchase of the Mavericks, Cuban co-founded the first commercial streaming company AudioNet, which became Broadcast.com, the leading provider of multimedia and streaming on the Internet. Broadcast.com was sold to Yahoo! Inc. in July 2000. MicroSolutions, a leading national systems integrator, was co-founded by Cuban and partner Martin Woodall in 1983, and later sold to CompuServe. In 2001, Cuban founded AXS TV (www.axs.tv) and sister network, HDNet Movies, the very first all high-definition TV network. He also co-owns the Landmark Theater chain, Magnolia Pictures, Magnolia Home Video and 2929 Productions along with partner Todd Wagner. With the release of the movie "Bubble" in 2005, Magnolia and Landmark Theaters pioneered the release of the movie's "day and date," meaning the movie was released in theaters, on TV (HDNet Movies) and on DVD all on the same day. Taking this process one step further, Cuban created the Ultra VOD platform, releasing movies to video on demand on both cable and satellite up to four weeks prior to their release in theaters. As an executor producer for 2929 and HDNet Films, Cuban has been nominated for seven Academy Awards® for "Enron," "The Smartest Guys In the Room" and "Good Night and Good Luck." He later sold HDNet in 2018. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| New Life for Old Drugs with Dr. David Fajgenbaum | 19 Nov 2025 | 00:36:18 | |
When David Fajgenbaum nearly died of Castleman disease for the fifth time, he decided to take fate into his own hands. Using his medical training, he searched for an existing drug that might save his life—and found one. Now his organization, Every Cure, is scaling the same approach to uncover hidden treatments for other diseases with no known cure. David and Claudia discussed:
Repurposing existing drugs makes so much sense. But as David points out, there’s no market for it: “Once a drug is generic.. the price is going to plummet… And even if you were to double the sales of your drug because you found a new disease area, now you've gone from 1% to 2% of what you got before… So there's no incentive whatsoever for our system to find a new use for a generic drug. Zero incentive.” Relevant Links
About Our Guest David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc, is co-Founder & President of Every Cure and a physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is one of the youngest faculty members ever to receive tenure at Penn Medicine. He is also the national bestselling author of Chasing My Cure: A Doctor’s Race to Turn Hope Into Action, which is being adapted into a film by Forrest Gump producer Wendy Finerman. During medical school, Fajgenbaum discovered a treatment that saved his own life and founded the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network. He has advanced 13 more repurposed treatments for cancers and rare diseases and co-founded Every Cure to unlock more hidden cures from existing medicines which has received over $100M from ARPA-H and TED’s Audacious Project. He also serves on the Board of Directors for the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA. One of the youngest recipients of multiple top NIH and FDA grants, Fajgenbaum has authored over 100 scientific papers in leading journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and The Journal of Clinical Investigation. He has been profiled by The New York Times, Good Morning America, TODAY, and Forbes 30 Under 30 and has received numerous honors, including the 2016 Atlas Award alongside then VP Joe Biden, 2022 NDRI Service to Science Award alongside Nobel Laureates Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, 2023 Philadelphia Citizen of the Year Award, and selection to the 2025 TIME100 Health list of the world’s most influential people in health. Fajgenbaum earned a BS from Georgetown University, MSc from the University of Oxford, MD from the University of Pennsylvania, and MBA from The Wharton School. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Gun Violence Interruption in American Cities with DeVone Boggan and Jason Corburn | 05 Nov 2025 | 00:47:42 | |
Richmond, California used to be called America’s “Murder Capital”. But when city leaders chose a different path the city’s gun violence problem dramatically declined. DeVone Boggan and UC Berkeley’s Jason Corburn join Claudia to discuss their new book “Advancing Peace”, which chronicles their efforts to reduce gun violence in Richmond and other cities by focusing on those most likely to pull the trigger. Boggan and Corburn make a case for an approach to gun violence interruption grounded in deep mentorship, community investment and healing and accountability. We discuss:
DeVone says that the greatest demonstration of this approach has always been Richmond: “From the moment we implemented the Peacemaker Fellowship in 2010, within 18 to 24 months after we did that, there were dramatic, precipitous reductions in gun violence… Our argument has been [that] when you get the right people to get at the right people the right way over a long period of time, here's living proof and demonstration of what can happen…In 2014, we achieved a 40 year low in gun violence [in Richmond].” Relevant Links
About Our Guests DeVone Boggan serves as Founder and CEO of Advance Peace. Advance Peace interrupts gun violence in American urban neighborhoods by providing transformational opportunities to young men involved in lethal firearm offenses and placing them in a high-touch, personalized fellowship. By working with and supporting a targeted group of individuals at the core of gun hostilities, Advance Peace bridges the gap between anti-violence programming and a hard-to-reach population at the center of violence in urban areas, thus breaking the cycle of gun hostilities and altering the trajectory of these men’s lives. DeVone is the former Neighborhood Safety Director and founding director of the Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS) for the City of Richmond, California. The ONS is a government, non-law enforcement agency that is charged with reducing firearm assaults and associated deaths in Richmond. Under his leadership as Neighborhood Safety Director, the city experienced a 71% reduction in gun violence between 2007 when the office was created and 2016. His work with ONS has been recognized in national publications and media, including the New York Times, Mother Jones, The Nation, Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post, TIME Magazine, PBS NewsHour, NPR, NBC Nightly News, ABC Nightline, CNBC, MSNBC, and CNN. Prior to his tenure in Richmond, DeVone served as Policy Director for Safe Passages, a nonprofit public/private partnership focused on improving urban health outcomes for children, youth and families. Jason Corburn is a Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning and School of Public Health. He directs the Center for Global Healthy Cities and co-directs the joint Master of City Planning (MCP) and Master of Public Health (MPH) degree program at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the links between environmental health and social justice in cities, notions of expertise in science-based policy making, and the role of local knowledge in addressing environmental and public health problems. Professor Corburn’s research and practice works to build partnerships between urban residents, professional scientists and decision-makers in order to collaboratively generate policy and planning solutions that improve the qualities of cities and the well-being of residents, particularly the poor and people of color. Professor Corburn is currently leading the evaluation of the Advance Peace, urban gun violence reduction program. This project is operating in 10 cities across the US, hires formerly incarcerated residents to act as ‘credible messengers’ to interrupt conflicts and mentor those at the center of gun violence in each city. The work takes a public health approach to eliminating gun violence, which means addressing the traumas experienced in disinvested in neighborhoods and helping to heal impacted people and places. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Smarter Venture Bets with Nancy Brown | 22 Oct 2025 | 00:31:18 | |
Investor Nancy Brown joins us at Aspen Ideas Health to share her blueprint for impactful investments. Identify public health breakthroughs that deliver measurable cost and quality improvements — then show how they can thrive in the marketplace. You don’t have to look far to see this playbook in action. One of the year’s biggest health exits, Omada Health, is a digital version of the CDC’s Diabetes Prevention Program. At Oak HC/FT, Nancy has partnered with entrepreneurs who are redefining how America stays healthy — and she’s eager to see more people with public health roots take the leap into building impactful companies. Please note: this conversation happened before HR1 was passed, so big Medicaid cuts were a threat but not yet a reality when we spoke. In this episode, we discuss:
Nancy reminds us that in reality, even a brilliant idea needs to have ROI built in: “We look for entrepreneurs, for innovators, who have really defined a way in which to find a cohort of patients, it could be pregnant Medicaid moms... And they have identified if they apply a certain clinical process consistently to that population, they will get a consistently good outcome, quality outcome, and they can do it in a sustainable [way] at a sustainable price.” Relevant Links
About Our Guest Nancy Brown is a General Partner at Oak HC/FT, a leading venture and growth equity firm investing in transformative healthcare and fintech companies. Since joining Oak HC/FT at its inception in 2014, Ms. Brown has focused on identifying and supporting technology-enabled healthcare services that deliver measurable clinical and financial impact. She focuses on growth equity and early-stage venture investments in healthcare, serving on the boards of innovative companies such as Firefly Health, Groups Recover Together, InterWell Health, Maven Clinic, Oshi Health, Regard, Unite Us, and Wayspring. Her portfolio also includes Noom, TurningPoint Healthcare Solutions, Limeade (ASX: LME), OncoHealth, and OODA Health. Ms. Brown brings over three decades of operational and leadership experience to her investment role. Prior to Oak HC/FT, she was Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at McKesson Technology Solutions and Chief Growth Officer at MedVentive (acquired by McKesson in 2012). Previously, she served as Senior Vice President of Clinical Services and Corporate Development at athenahealth, and earlier held senior roles at McKesson and Harvard Community Health Plan. She also co-founded Abaton.com, one of the first web-based clinical solution companies, which was later acquired by McKesson. A graduate of the University of New Hampshire (B.S. in Zoology) and Northeastern University (MBA), Ms. Brown is an active mentor and advisor. She serves on Northeastern’s D’Amore‑McKim School of Business Dean’s Executive Council and is involved in the Roux Institute’s Future of Healthcare Founder Residency program. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Stories Move the World with Zoanne Clack | 08 Oct 2025 | 00:33:42 | |
Grey’s Anatomy Executive Producer and physician Dr. Zoanne Clack joins The Other 80 at Aspen Ideas: Health to talk about what public health leaders can learn from Hollywood storytelling. After training as a doctor and working for the CDC, Zoanne followed her childhood dreams and moved to Hollywood. With no job or warm leads, Zoanne set out to use the power of storytelling to drive health change. We discuss:
Zoanne reminds us that stories - even about fictional characters - have the ability to help us move the world: “I think just having that, that feeling of belonging, that feeling of these are my people, and I am very interested in what they're doing and thinking is just a great way for the media in Hollywood to have impact.” Relevant Links
About Our Guest Zoanne Clack is executive producer and showrunner for “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Station 19.” An emergency medicine physician turned TV writer and showrunner, Clack is best known for her influential writing roles on these critically acclaimed ABC-TV series, where she combines her medical background and artistic flair, offering a unique and authentic touch. As a writer/producer on "Grey's Anatomy" since the show began, she has played an integral role in the show's longevity and cultural impact. She uses her knowledge of entertainment education to promote global public health issues through the media, advocating for representation and inclusivity and providing diverse characterizations as well as poignant social commentary. Clack is co-chair of the Norman Lear Center’s Hollywood, Health & Society program at USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism and serves on the board or as an advisor of several global health groups. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Is AI Public Health’s New Ally? with Dr. Karen DeSalvo | 24 Sep 2025 | 00:34:03 | |
AI is going to transform healthcare - but how do we ensure it does so responsibly, equitably and ethically? Google’s former Chief Health Officer, Dr. Karen DeSalvo, says that AI could be public health’s new best friend - if we use it in the right ways. Karen sits down with Claudia at Aspen Ideas Health to talk about her longtime career as a public health leader and where she sees a role for AI in helping to take some heat off public health communicators. She’s interested in how AI can support - not replace - our human values. We discuss:
Karen underscored that AI-enabled robots will bring new ethical challenges: “I think when robotics becomes more commonplace, that also raises some of the need for us to be very thoughtful as a society about the ethical challenges when there's a physical manifestation of the models that's not just in a computer screen or even through your glasses, but as the robots get more and more humanoid.” Relevant Links
About Our Guest Dr. Karen DeSalvo is a physician executive working at the intersection of medicine, public health, and information technology to help everyone, everywhere, live a healthier life. She leads a team of experts at Google who build helpful products, develop AI solutions focused on some of the biggest health challenges and bring information and insights to consumers, caregivers and communities with the aim of democratizing access to health and healthcare. She provides clinical leadership for Google employee health, including as part of the company COVID response team. Prior to joining Google, Dr. DeSalvo was National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and Assistant Secretary for Health (Acting) in the Obama Administration. Dr. DeSalvo served as the New Orleans Health Commissioner following Hurricane Katrina and was previously Vice Dean for Community Affairs and Health Policy at the Tulane School of Medicine where she was a practicing internal medicine physician, educator, and researcher. She is co-founder of the National Alliance to Impact the Social Determinants of Health. Dr. DeSalvo serves on the Council of the National Academy of Medicine and the Board of Directors for Welltower. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Take Your Moonshot: 13 Ideas to Reimagine Health | 10 Sep 2025 | 00:25:58 | |
In a time where we need hope and innovation more than ever, we asked 13 health leaders—all guests on this podcast—what they would do to reimagine health. Tune into the episode to hear what they shared (in order of appearance):
Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes. | |||
| A “Slow Tech” Approach to Health Innovation with Katie Drasser | 30 Jul 2025 | 00:31:18 | |
When we think about digital tools and technology, we think of them as moving fast. Katie Drasser, CEO of Rock Health, joins me to discuss what a “slow tech” approach to health innovation could look like. It would ground innovation in participatory design, build community trust and aim for long term impact, not just rapid scaling. We discuss:
Katie reminds us that designing for the most overlooked ends up helping everyone: “There's that theory – the curb cut theory – [that says] if you design for the most marginalized, if you design for the most overlooked, it's actually better for everybody. And so… how might we design for those most left out? And actually, the folks that are always included would actually benefit too.” Relevant Links
About Our Guest Katie is an entrepreneurial leader committed to equality and justice who has launched groundbreaking, inclusive programs that address complex global issues with a focus on public health innovation and the role of innovative financing and leadership in systems change. As the CEO of RockHealth.org, she leads a team of experts in health equity, social enterprise and design to encourage more equitable innovation in digital health. Previously, Katie curated health content for the Aspen Ideas Festival and was Managing Director of the Aspen Global Innovators Group, where she led global leadership programs to address poverty alleviation and human rights. Katie has worked nationally and around the world on initiatives including HIV/AIDS treatment strategies in Romania, private health services delivery in Myanmar, and the scale up of Kenya’s national emergency medical system. She also built a range of start-ups, designing a network of charter schools, and developing Good Capital, a venture fund that invests millions in social enterprises like The Hub Bay Area and the Social Capital Markets Conference. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Snake Oil & Smoothies: What's Up With the Booming Wellness Industry? with Amy Larocca | 17 Jul 2025 | 00:38:15 | |
On the surface, what the wellness industry is offering feels like an antidote to our fragmented and fast-paced lives. Influencers and companies use words like "mindfulness" or “whole foods” or “self care” to get our stressed out, burnt out buy in. But, somewhere along the line those promises start to morph into luxury services, expensive memberships and supplements you never knew you needed. In her book “How to Be Well” former fashion journalist Amy Larocca explores the blurred line between healing and branding in a $6 trillion dollar industry. We discuss:
Amy says what attracts people to the modern fitness class has parallels to religious practices: “So if you look at what happens in ritual religious gatherings… You see a lot of that replicated in a lot of these boutique fitness settings. You have ritual, you have music, you have ecstatic movement, you have charismatic leaders, you have a sermon. And these sermons have increasingly moved away from talk of muffin tops and bikini bodies and losing that whatever it is, to kindness, community, thinking about your place in the world, thinking about taking the energy that you are building up in that room and spreading it forward. ” Relevant Links
About Our Guest Amy Larocca is an award-winning American journalist. She spent 20 years working at New York Magazine as both Fashion Director and Editor at Large. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Town & Country, and the London Review of Books, among others. She lives with her family in New York and North London. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Why We Need a Social Health Movement with Kasley Killam | 02 Jul 2025 | 00:43:17 | |
Loneliness isn’t just a feeling - it’s a public health crisis. The number of hours we spend with friends is rapidly decreasing, more and more Americans report feeling lonely, and loneliness is linked to bad health outcomes like risk of premature death, heart disease, stroke, depression and anxiety. Kasley Killam, author of “The Art and Science and Connection”, joins us to talk about why social health should be the third pillar of wellness alongside physical and mental health. We discuss:
Kasley talks about how vulnerability is key to building trust and human connection: “When you share something a little vulnerable that goes beyond… surface level and small talk, that is like this magical way of deepening connections, right? It builds trust, it builds intimacy, it makes us relatable, it helps us get to know each other better. And so … there I am with a complete stranger who… I've maybe shared something on stage or in conversation, they're now sharing something really intimate and vulnerable about their life and that just creates this beautiful moment. ” Relevant Links
About Our Guest Kasley Killam is a leading expert in social health and author of The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier, and Happier. As a Harvard-trained social scientist, 2X TED speaker, sought-after advisor, and award-winning founder, Killam has been dedicated to improving well-being through human connection for nearly 15 years. Globally recognized for her thought leadership on social health, Killam’s collaborations with top organizations like Google, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the World Economic Forum contribute to building more socially healthy products, workplaces, and communities. Discover her insights in outlets like The New York Times, Forbes, NPR, CNBC, and The Washington Post and join her newsletter community at www.kasleykillam.com. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| The Four Billion Dollar Question with Dr. Bechara Choucair | 18 Jun 2025 | 00:39:32 | |
What if instead of treating illness we also confronted the reasons Americans get sick in the first place? That’s the origin of this podcast and also the four billion dollar question Dr. Bechara Choucair is tackling at Kaiser Permanente as Chief Community Health Officer. He joins Claudia to talk about the organization’s focus on climate change and health, workforce pipelines and addressing unmet social needs. We discuss:
Bechara reminds us that bridge-building is a crucial part of this community health work: “We need more and more bridges between public health and healthcare... [They have] operated as two separate disciplines operating in their own silos... [When] there is a public health emergency we build more bridges, we strengthen those bridges that already exist. And then when that public health emergency subsides, we all retreat into our own disciplines and we continue that siloed journey.” Relevant Links
About Our Guest Dr. Bechara Choucair, MD, is executive vice president and chief community health officer for Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. and Hospitals — known as Kaiser Permanente, one of America’s leading integrated health care providers and not-for-profit health plans. Dr. Choucair oversees the organization’s national community health efforts and philanthropic giving activities aimed at improving the health of its 12.2 million members and the 68 million people within the communities it serves. Previously, Dr. Choucair served as senior vice president, Safety Net and Community Health, at Trinity Health, and was the commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health. Dr. Choucair, a family physician by training, completed his Family Practice Residency at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. He holds an MD from the American University of Beirut and a master’s degree in health care management from the University of Texas at Dallas. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| The Truth As We Know It with Dr. Robert Califf | 04 Jun 2025 | 00:39:36 | |
The US leads the world in biomedical innovation, with about 40% of patents being filed by US scientists and companies. The FDA plays a critical role in supporting and enabling this innovation pipeline and our guest Dr. Robert Califf was commissioner of the agency not once, but twice under Presidents Obama and Biden. He joins us to talk about what Americans should know about FDA’s critical role and the threats to its functioning from the dramatic cuts the Trump administration has made over the last three months. We discuss:
What would Califf’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda be? “We need to develop reliable, repetitive sources of information that help people do things that are healthy and beneficial. That part of MAHA I like a lot…The second thing is… I'm developing connections with people who are thinking differently about primary care because I think everybody agrees there's no way you can take the current workforce and deliver what's needed. So it's got to be linked up with AI and digital technologies, but also with a very different looking workforce that gets paid differently, has more respect.” Relevant Links
About Our Guest Robert M. Califf, MD served as FDA Commmissioner under Presidents Biden and Obama. Califf is a nationally recognized expert in cardiovascular medicine, health outcomes research, health care quality, and clinical research, and a leader in the growing field of translational research. Prior to rejoining the FDA in 2022, Califf was head of medical strategy and senior advisor at Alphabet, contributing to strategy and policy for its health subsidiaries Verily Life Sciences and Google Health. Prior to Alphabet, he was professor of medicine and vice chancellor for clinical and translational research at Duke University, director of the Duke Translational Medicine Institute, and founding director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute. Dr. Califf is a graduate of Duke University School of Medicine. He completed a residency in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and a fellowship in cardiology at Duke. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Building Nest Health with Dr. Rebekah Gee | 21 May 2025 | 00:43:09 | |
Could primary care at home unlock better health and lower costs for American families? Rebekah Gee, a physician and policymaker turned entrepreneur, joins us to talk about the big bet her company Nest Health is making on home-based primary care. It’s a model that makes sense for families and delivers results. In the first year of operations Nest doubled primary care visits, reduced ER visits, and increased childhood immunizations. We discuss:
Rebekah shared about an exchange with Elon Musk on the short sightedness of Medicaid cuts: “So Nest came out with our savings numbers. We put out some really good information about the health of children and the opportunities. And Elon Musk retweeted it. So as a result of that, we actually got a lot of press. But I wrote back to him and said, ‘I'm glad you like this concept. And just remember, don't cut health care for children because we'll be paying far more for that than you will ever save.’ ” Relevant Links
About Our Guest Dr. Rebekah Gee is the founder and CEO of Nest Health, a technology-enabled whole-family primary care provider providing care at home and virtually to Americans who struggle to receive comprehensive care. Previously, Dr. Gee served as Secretary of Health for the State of Louisiana. In that cabinet-level role, she led the expansion of Medicaid. As Secretary, she was responsible for nearly half the state budget including Medicaid, public health, aging and adult services, licensure, sanitation, disability services, and a nearly 2,000 bed state hospital system. As Secretary, she developed a first-in-the-nation subscription model for the drugs that cure Hepatitis C that is being used as a national and international model for increased drug access and affordability. Dr. Gee has served as an advisor to multiple Governors, presidential campaigns, and policy efforts at the state and national level. Her board service includes medical advisory support of public companies Select Quote and 3D systems. She has also served as a board member or advisor to Ready Responders, Ouva, Noble, NCQA, NQF, IHI, the Penn Center for Behavioral Economics, and the Duke-Margolis Institute. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Shifting Power with Dr. Tony Iton (Encore Episode) | 07 May 2025 | 00:43:53 | |
Whether it's the civil rights movement, marriage equality or even seatbelt laws, community organizing is how change happens in America. In this encore episode, Dr. Tony Iton shares a masterclass in how social, political and economic power shape health outcomes and how to meaningfully shift those dynamics when it matters most. Tony argues that reinvigorating democracy at the community and local level is where we should be doubling down. This episode was impactful when it was first released but is even more relevant and timely now. We discuss:
Tony digs into why power matters in health: “We're talking about essentially community-level power, what we refer to as community agency, and we basically theorized that if we could build social, political and economic power in a critical mass of people in 14 low-income communities that have documented health disparities, that we could improve the health status of those populations over a 10-year period… We weren't thinking that there was something that we needed to do to people. In other words, it wasn't like increasing access to healthcare or, you know, enhancing the quality of public health education. This was fundamentally about unleashing the power of communities to [determine how resources are distributed].“ Relevant Links
About Our Guest Dr. Tony Iton is a Social Impact Fellow and lecturer at UC Berkeley School of Public Health. He was the Senior Vice President of Programs & Partnerships at The California Endowment from October 2009 to June 2024. Prior to his appointment at The Endowment, Iton served from 2003 as both the director and County Health Officer for the Alameda County Public Health Department. In that role, he oversaw the creation of an innovative public health practice designed to eliminate health disparities by tackling the root causes of poor health that limit quality of life and lifespan in many of California's low-income communities. Iton also served for three years as director of Health and Human Services and School Medical Advisor for the City of Stamford, Connecticut. Concurrent to that, he also served as a physician in internal medicine for Stamford Hospital's HIV Clinic. In addition, Iton served for five years as a primary care physician for the San Francisco Department of Public Health. Iton's varied career also includes past service as a staff attorney and Health Policy analyst for the West Coast regional office of Consumer's Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. Iton, who has been published in numerous public health and medical publications, is a regular public health lecturer and keynote speaker at conferences across the nation. He earned his B.S. in Neurophysiology, with honors, from McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec, his J.D. at the University of California, Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, and his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Source: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drtonyiton/ Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Covered California: A Startup in Government with Dr. Monica Soni | 23 Apr 2025 | 00:41:51 | |
California is full of hardworking people—nurses, teachers, delivery drivers, baristas—who keep our communities running. Many of them live paycheck-to-paycheck, making too much to qualify for most government benefits, but not enough to afford the basics. For nearly 2 million Californians, Covered California provides a critical lifeline, offering access to affordable health insurance and now basic needs support. Dr. Monica Soni, Chief Medical Officer of Covered California, joins Claudia to talk about the program’s important and expanding role in the California landscape. We discuss:
Monica’s team uses experiments and user research to shape every aspect of the program: “But I do think in our DNA is this idea of innovation. In-house, we have a research team that does randomized controlled trials. We're committed to hyper transparency. Almost all of our data is released. We stratify it by everything we can think of to really identify where there might be pockets of coverage that aren't there or outcomes that are suboptimal. And we do a lot of deep listening with consumers and with the community to help inform what we do.“ Relevant Links
About Our Guest Dr. S. Monica Soni is the Chief Medical Officer, and a Chief Deputy Executive Director at Covered California, leading the organization’s Health Equity and Quality Transformation division. In this capacity she is responsible for health equity, health care strategy, medical policy, and other clinical operations to continuously improve not only the health services provided through Covered California’s contracted health plans, but also California’s delivery system. She is a board-certified internal medicine physician with more than a decade of experience working in both inpatient and outpatient settings and continues to see patients. She is an Associate Professor within the UCLA Department of Medicine and the Charles R. Drew University Department of Internal Medicine, where she is committed to residency diversification and pipeline development. Prior to joining Covered California, Dr. Soni served as Associate Chief Medical Officer within Evolent Health focused on the delivery of high-quality, cost-effective specialty care for the over 16 million supported Medicaid lives across the United States. During her time at the organization, she played a critical role in clinical informatics, provider engagement, value-based strategies and innovation. Dr. Soni also served as the Director of Specialty Care for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, the second-largest municipal health system in the United States. There she ensured the delivery of timely and equitable specialty care across four hospitals, 20 ambulatory care clinics, the correctional health system and more than 200 community partners. She also worked as the Director of Continuity Care for Martin Luther King, Jr. Outpatient Center, where she led primary care, urgent care and transitions of care. A graduate of Harvard College, Dr. Soni graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology. She received her medical degree from Harvard Medical School and completed her residency in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco with a focus in primary care. In addition, Dr. Soni was a fellow in the California Health Care Foundation Leadership Program and the Carol Emmott Foundation Fellowship. She is currently a board member for Mercy Housing California, a leading affordable housing organization, and previously served as a commissioner for the Los Angeles County Hospital and Health Care Delivery Commission. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Health Interrupted: The Stories of Six Recently Fired Federal Workers | 09 Apr 2025 | 00:34:26 | |
In the wake of massive layoffs at HHS - and so many other federal agencies and programs - we are sharing the powerful stories of federal workers who had no choice but to leave their important work when they were fired post-election. You’ll hear from a former marine who was improving primary care for fellow veterans, a child of farmworkers who was expanding economic opportunities for rural communities and a technologist who was improving the organ transplant distribution system. They used their exquisite talents to help communities thrive and connect people with care they desperately needed. And now they aren’t. Relevant Links If you’re interested in hiring one of the amazing leaders who shared their story in this episode, connect with them on LinkedIn: Andrew Lennox: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewlennoxmi/ Aileen Wood: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aileen-wood-163585108/ Jesus Morillo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesusmurillo97/ Amy Paris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-paris-4950831/ Ashley Hackett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-hackett/ Jennifer Robinson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-robinson-phd-mph/ Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes! | |||
| Medicaid on the Brink with Katie Heidorn, Kody Kinsley & Larry Levitt | 26 Mar 2025 | 00:54:20 | |
With the House approving a plan to slash $880 billion from the federal budget, all eyes are turning to Medicaid as the most likely source of cuts. I asked former North Carolina Health Secretary Kody Kinsley, KFF’s Larry Levitt and California Health Care Foundation’s Katie Heidorn to join me to discuss the likely shape and impact of proposed cuts, and take questions from UC Berkeley students. Kody called it a “self-licking ice cream cone”—cuts that destabilize the government, leading to further cuts. Larry warned of formula battles that will soon erupt. Katie laid out the devastating effects on state budgets. We’ve also released this episode as a full video episode on YouTube. Subscribe to The Other 80 YouTube channel for video extras, video episodes and viral healthcare policy content. Click here to watch this episode in full. Watch the full VIDEO version of this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X110GShMTtE&t=52s Relevant Links
About Our Guests Katie Heidorn is the director of state health policy at CHCF, where she leverages the foundation’s data, expertise, and partnerships to help California’s state government make informed decisions about health care. Katie is based in CHCF’s Sacramento office. Katie has nearly two decades of experience working in health policy, government, and nonprofits and is a skilled leader, facilitator, and communicator. She comes to CHCF after more than two years as executive director for the Insure the Uninsured Project (ITUP). Before that, Katie was the government affairs advocate for Health Net and the development director and policy lead at the nonprofit California Coverage and Health Initiatives. Katie spent a decade in California state government, including as a deputy secretary for the California Health and Human Services Agency and principal consultant in the Senate Appropriations Committee. She is also an alumna of the California Senate Fellows Program. Katie received her master’s degree in Public Administration from the University of Southern California and bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Comparative Literature from the University of California, Davis. Source: https://www.chcf.org/person/katie-heidorn/ Kody Kinsley served as Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services from January 2022 to January 2025. In his role, he led operational aspects of COVID-19 response, including purchasing and distribution of personal protective equipment, scaling access to testing, and contact tracing. In addition to the COVID-19 response, Kinsley leads North Carolina's behavioral health and intellectual and developmental disability policies and systems. His work focuses on re-designing the public insurance system, combating the opioid epidemic, and improving operations of state organizations and the broader delivery system. His policy efforts have focused on supporting trauma-informed and resilient communities and schools, diverting and treating justice-involved populations, and increasing community levels of care. Kinsley’s past experience spans the public and private sectors, including positions at the White House, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, leading operations for a behavioral health care service provider in western North Carolina, and most recently serving as the presidentially-appointed Assistant Secretary for Management for the United States Department of the Treasury. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Brevard College and his master of public policy from the University of California, Berkeley. Source: https://www.sog.unc.edu/about/faculty-and-staff/kody-kinsley Larry Levitt is the executive vice president for health policy, overseeing KFF’s policy work on Medicare, Medicaid, the health care marketplace, the Affordable Care Act, racial equity, women’s health, and global health. He previously was editor-in-chief of kaisernetwork.org, which was KFF’s online health policy news and information service and directed KFF’s communications. Levitt, along with Dr. Mollyann Brodie, work with KFF’s founding President and CEO, Dr. Drew Altman, to oversee the organization. Prior to joining KFF, Levitt served as a senior health policy adviser to the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services, working on the development of the Clinton Administration’s Health Security Act and other health policy initiatives. Earlier, he was the special assistant for health policy with California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, a medical economist with Kaiser Permanente, and served in a number of positions in Massachusetts state government. Levitt holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Source: https://www.kff.org/person/larry-levitt/ Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn For video versions of special episodes, or to see video extras from our audio-only episodes - subscribe to The Other 80's YouTube channel. | |||
| The Empire State’s Big Bet with Amir Bassiri | 12 Mar 2025 | 00:37:20 | |
New York Medicaid has made some big bets on social care recently, and Amir Bassiri is here to answer all our questions. The bold new program centers on nine new regional networks that will be hubs for community organizations offering housing, food and other services. Will this program survive the new administration? Only time will tell. We discuss:
Amir says he’s hoping negotiating with the Trump administration goes better than last time: “We will have to negotiate our demonstration or the renewal of our demonstration with the current administration. The waiver does expire in 27. We have to renew it beginning one year prior to its conclusion, which means we will be negotiating with the Trump administration on our waiver. We've done that before, it did not work out well. “ Relevant Links
About Our Guest Amir Bassiri, MSW (he, him, his) is the Medicaid Director for the New York State Department of Health. Mr. Bassiri joined the Department of Health in 2019 as Chief of Staff to the Medicaid Director and recently served as the Deputy Medicaid Director, overseeing the operation and performance of nine Medicaid Divisions. Collectively, these nine Divisions are comprised of more than 750 State staff, over 500 contracted staff and management of over 300 contracts, including some of the State's largest technology, actuarial and financial audit contracts, along with health plans. Prior to his work with the Department, Mr. Bassiri worked as a Senior Policy Advisor for Health in the Governor's Office under the Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services. Mr. Bassiri earned his BA in both Economics and Psychology from the University of California, Davis, before earning a Master's in Social Work (MSW) from Columbia University. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn | |||
| Car Sick with David Zipper | 26 Feb 2025 | 00:44:45 | |
Driving fast on the open road is almost as American as apple pie. We all remember the thrill of our first car - a symbol of American freedom and independence. But is our love affair with cars killing us? David Zipper joins us to talk about the wide ranging health impacts of our car obsession, and how policy innovations like congestion pricing and weight-based taxes could offer a way out. We dive into:
David says it’s time to focus on safety of those outside our vehicles, not just inside: “We have spent so much time over decades emphasizing the safety of those inside a vehicle that we have… basically enabled the creation of these Goliaths of SUVs and trucks on our roads, where the marginal size provides maybe an incremental marginal safety benefit for occupants, but at an enormous cost to everybody outside of that huge car... We have… recently hit a year high for pedestrian and cyclist deaths in the US… If I were to rewrite Nader's book, like still unsafe at any speed, I would put much more of the focus on the safety of those outside the car as opposed to occupants.” Relevant Links Learn more about the MIT Mobility Initiative Visit David Zipper’s website Read articles by David Zipper: In Vox (“Gigantic SUVs are a public health threat. Why don’t we treat them like one?”), Slate (“There is no technology fix for car bloat”) and Fast Company (“Who’s really to blame – and who isn’t – for America’s traffic death epidemic”). About Our Guest David Zipper is a Senior Fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, examining the intersection of transportation policy, technology, and society. With experience in city government, venture capital, and consulting, he advises public agencies and foundations on improving transportation outcomes. A contributing writer for Vox and Bloomberg CityLab, his work focuses on road safety, climate change, and transit strategies. He previously served in leadership roles in Washington D.C. and New York City, and holds degrees from Harvard, Cambridge, and Swarthmore. Stay Informed Sign up for The Other 80 Newsletter to receive a monthly update with reflections, news, events, jobs and funding curated for you by Claudia. Click here to sign up. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| The Secret Life of Caregivers with Alexandra Drane | 12 Feb 2025 | 00:22:08 | |
An incredible 43% of Americans are unpaid caregivers, who are often alone with the burden and blessing of caring for their loved ones as life begins and in the complex and heartbreaking final days. Studies show their mental health is suffering – 52% of “sandwich generation” caregivers report that they have actively thought about suicide in the last 30 days. Alexandra Drane, CEO of ARCHANGELS, joins us to talk about the urgent need for culture and policy change to see, honor and support unpaid caregivers. We discuss:
Alex reminds us to reach out to caregivers in our lives: “And most importantly, unpaid caregivers are drowning, right? Don't wait for them to ask for help .. Don't say, “How can I help you”? Because they're too tired. Oh, well, just freaking help fill their fridge, mow their lawns, sit with their mom, whatever it takes.” Relevant Links Read more about Alex’s venture ARCHANGELS See data on caregivers from The COPE Initiative Learn more about the movement Alex founded called “Engage With Grace” See information on the Care Badge About Our Guest Alexandra Drane is co-founder and CEO of ARCHANGELS, a national movement and a platform that is reframing how caregivers are seen, honored, and supported using a combination of data and stories, through public and private partnerships. She co-founded Eliza Corporation (acquired by HMS Holdings Corp: HMSY), Engage with Grace, and three other companies (all boot-strapped). A serial entrepreneur, she is also a cashier-on-leave for Walmart. She believes communities are the frontline of health, that caregivers are our country’s greatest asset, and that we need to expand the definition of health to include life. She has one hobby outside of her passion for revolutionizing health care, and her love of family and adventure…car racing. Stay Informed Sign up for The Other 80 Newsletter to receive a monthly update with reflections, news, events, jobs and funding curated for you by Claudia. Click here to sign up. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| Transforming Primary Care with AI with Dr. Kameron Matthews | 29 Jan 2025 | 00:36:06 | |
If AI is going to rapidly improve healthcare, shouldn’t we start at the ground floor - with primary care? Cityblock’s Chief Health Officer Dr. Kameron Matthews joins us to talk about how AI can reduce complexity and burnout, improve patient outcomes and free care teams to focus on human connections. We discuss:
Kameron reminds us that we cannot just drop new technologies onto care teams: “We have respect for the change management that is required to bring forward these new technologies and allow our care teams to really merge them into their current day to day practice. It's not about, as we have seen for years with EHRs. It's not about just putting them through some horrible modular training, but about actually bringing them to a level of understanding and being a part of the decision making of how we're adopting this technology, how we're blending it into their day to day, how it's making their job easier.” Relevant Links
About Our Guest As the Chief Health Officer at Cityblock Health, I lead the clinical strategy and operations for a rapidly growing company that provides innovative, personalized, and accessible care to individuals and communities with complex health and social needs. I bring over 15 years of experience as a board-certified family physician, a health policy expert, and a mentor to aspiring and practicing health professionals from diverse backgrounds. My mission is to transform health care delivery and outcomes for underserved populations by leveraging innovative operations, data, technology, and human-centered design. I have co-founded and directed Tour for Diversity in Medicine, a national initiative that educates and inspires future physicians, dentists, and pharmacists of color, and serve as a Health Innovators Fellow at the Aspen Institute, a prestigious program that fosters entrepreneurial and values-driven leadership in health care. I have been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the highest honor in the field, and served as a senior executive at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, where I oversaw the largest integrated health care network in the country in the Office of Community Care and later served as Chief Medical Officer of the health system. I am passionate about advancing health equity, quality, and innovation, and empowering the next generation of health care leaders. Source: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kameronmatthews/ Stay Informed If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to The Other 80 for more conversations on equity, innovation, and healthcare. Sign up for The Other 80 Newsletter to receive a monthly update with reflections, news, events, jobs and funding curated for you by Claudia. Click here to sign up. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| Hard and Soft Powers with Micky Tripathi | 15 Jan 2025 | 00:30:36 | |
For the past 20 years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the ONC has played a pivotal role shaping and regulating the health tech market. On the eve of the election, Micky Tripathi joined me to discuss the agency’s recently expanded role. Now, two months later—though it feels like a decade—the future is uncertain. Will the ONC and ASTP continue as market regulators and opportunity catalysts, or is a new direction on the horizon? Here’s what we covered:
Micky thinks we are standing on the edge of a transformative era: “We are just at the beginning of the most exciting decade...health information technology can really start to show… the return on investment for patients. We've done a lot of hard work over the last 10 years… [With that foundation in place] we have the opportunity to say there's an ROI here for patients.” Relevant Links
About Our Guest Micky Tripathi is the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, and Acting Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he leads the formulation of HHS technology and data strategy and coordinates technology policies, standards, programs, and investments. Dr. Tripathi has over 20 years of experience across the health IT landscape. Prior to joining the federal government he served as Chief Alliance Officer for Arcadia, a health care data and software company focused on population health management and value-based care, the project manager of the Argonaut Project, an industry collaboration to accelerate the adoption of FHIR, and a board member of HL7, the Sequoia Project, the CommonWell Health Alliance, and the CARIN Alliance. Dr. Tripathi served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative (MAeHC), a non-profit health IT advisory and clinical data analytics company. He was also the founding President and CEO of the Indiana Health Information Exchange, a statewide HIE partnered with the Regenstrief Institute, an Executive Advisor to investment firm LRVHealth, and a Fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He holds a PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Master of Public Policy from Harvard University, and an AB in political science from Vassar College. Prior to receiving his PhD, he was a Presidential Management Fellow and a senior operations research analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in Washington, DC, for which he received the Secretary of Defense Meritorious Civilian Service Medal. Source: https://www.healthit.gov/leadership/micky-tripathi-phd-mpp Stay Informed If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to The Other 80 for more conversations on equity, innovation, and healthcare. Sign up for The Other 80 Newsletter to receive a monthly update with reflections, news, events, jobs and funding curated for you by Claudia. Click here to sign up. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| The Big Squeeze with Paul Markovich | 11 Dec 2024 | 00:27:16 | |
There’s a lot of concern right now about healthcare affordability, but not enough action. Paul Markovich, the CEO of Blue Shield of California, is on a mission to bring down health costs by reducing administrative overhead and negotiating lower drug prices. In this episode we dive deep into Paul’s call to action for healthcare leaders to tackle the affordability crisis head-on. Paul and I discuss:
Paul says healthcare affordability isn't just a pocketbook issues for patients, it’s also a huge economic issue for the nation: “The reality is we are facing a huge affordability crisis, a fiscal crisis right now. Even though our economy is running pretty much at or near full employment, we have record fiscal deficits… We cannot keep spending on this program the way that we are. We need to bring the spending down... Even our dysfunctional political system is going to have to deal with that.” Relevant Links California’s new data sharing law Announcement of new Humira biosimilar Investment in nonprodit Civica for lower cost generics New prior authorization platform with Salesforce About Our Guest Paul Markovich is Chief Executive Officer of Blue Shield of California, a nonprofit health plan with $25 billion in annual revenue serving 4.8 million members in the state's commercial, individual, and government markets. Markovich has launched and led numerous initiatives to drive innovation and help reimagine healthcare, including funding support for a statewide provider directory to make it easier for Californians to find physicians and facilities in their plan; supporting development of a statewide health information network for patients’ records, enabling more seamless and holistic care; and investing in a partnership with the California Medical Association to help physicians pilot new care delivery models and leverage technology. Markovich is a North Dakota native and Rhodes Scholar with a master’s in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University. He is a graduate of Colorado College, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in International Political Economy and played Division I hockey. Stay Informed Sign up for The Other 80 Newsletter to receive a monthly update with reflections, news, events, jobs and funding curated for you by Claudia. Click here to sign up. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| Breaking up the Deadly Organ Transplant Monopoly with Donna Cryer | 27 Nov 2024 | 00:35:19 | |
On so many issues, Congress has not been willing or able to act. But when faced with horrifying stories of death and mismanagement, Congress finally passed legislation to reform the US organ transplant system. They did so because people like Donna Cryer, a transplant recipient and patient advocate, demanded a better system for Americans who need lifesaving organ transplants. Now, as the new law moves into implementation, the work continues. In this episode, Donna and I discuss:
Donna says we all need to start listening more closely to patients with lived experience: “I often think if you... had many people with great deals of experience and intelligence who were highly motivated to help you achieve your goal. Why would you not want to use them? Why would you not want to partner with them? Why would you work really, really hard to keep them away from solving the problem? And that's how people treat patients and patient advocates.” Relevant Links Donna Cryer’s testimony to the Senate Finance Committee on organ transplant system failures (just past the 48:00 mark) Summary of the new law to break up the organ transplantation monopoly More about the Global Liver Institute See more details about the Advanced Advocacy Academy Donna's organization launched Visit UNOS’ website About Our Guest Donna R. Cryer, JD is the Founder and former Chief Executive Officer of Global Liver Institute, the only patient-driven liver health nonprofit operating across the US, EU, and UK. GLI convenes the NASH, Liver Cancer and Pediatric and Rare Liver Disease Councils, as well as the Liver Action Network, collectively more than 200 organizations. Mrs. Cryer has channeled her personal experience as a patient with inflammatory bowel disease and a 29-year liver transplant recipient into professional advocacy across a career in law, policy, consulting, public relations, clinical trial recruitment, and nonprofit management. At GLI, Mrs. Cryer has raised more than $10 million for liver health initiatives. She is a frequent speaker on the topic of patient-centeredness and patient engagement in healthcare transformation and created a unique model for advocacy that mobilizes patients, influences policy, and coalesces clinicians to improve patient outcomes. Mrs. Cryer serves on the Boards of Directors for the Council of Medical Specialty Societies, Sibley Memorial Hospital/Johns Hopkins Medicine, the Innovation and Value Initiative (IVI), and the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative. She was the first patient to serve on the ABIM Gastroenterology Specialty Board, was one of the founding members of the AASLD Patient Advisory Committee and is the Community Representative on the AASLD NASH Task Force. She has been named one of the Top Blacks in Healthcare by the Milken Institute at GW School of Public Health and BlackDoctors.org, one of the Top 10 Patients Who Make An Impact by Health 2.0 and one of PharmaVoice’s 100 Most Inspiring People. Mrs. Cryer received an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a Juris Doctorate from the Georgetown University Law Center. Source: https://globalliver.org/who-we-are/ Stay Informed Sign up for The Other 80 Newsletter to receive a monthly update with reflections, news, events, jobs and funding curated for you by Claudia. Click here to sign up. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| The Good Fight with Dr. Theresa Cullen | 13 Nov 2024 | 00:41:42 | |
Dr. Theresa “Terry” Cullen is on a mission to make Pima County, Arizona one of the healthiest counties in the nation. It’s a challenging goal, and one that will take dedication and a willingness to fight for what’s right. But, Terry is a self-described, life-long pugilist – with an approach to healthcare that goes beyond policies and programs. Everything she does is rooted in her deep belief in accompaniment; that her role is to walk alongside her patients and community offering empathy, dignity and respect. We discuss:
Terry reminds us that sometimes we need to step back and look at the work we do through a new lens: “My husband's an artist, and he challenges me all the time to look at something and look at the light. Look at the composition. Look at where it is. What's the pattern there? You know, and a lot of medicine is based on pattern, but think of a disruptive pattern. Think of a puzzle where the piece doesn't fit and what do you need to do to make that piece fit? Because if it falls into place, maybe the whole thing will heal.” Relevant Links Resolve to save lives - 717 alliance About Our Guest Theresa Cullen is currently the Public Health Director of Pima County, Arizona. She has developed a strategic approach to transformational health status change with a goal of health equity through supporting a learning public health system model based on data and action. She continues to work closely with Tribal, federal, state and local partners to ensure that community needs are integrated into planning with a goal of health justice. Dr. Cullen, RADM (retired) USPHS, began her family medicine clinical career with Indian Health Service (IHS) and worked in leadership positions for 25 years with American Indian/Alaska Native communities with a goal of improving health status through innovation and data informatics. Dr. Cullen worked as the Chief Medical Information Officer for the Veterans Health Administration from 2012-2015 and Associate Director of Global Health Informatics at the Regenstrief Institute. She has been honored with multiple local, state and national awards including the USPHS Distinguished Service Medal, the University of Arizona Medical College Alumni Award, and the AMIA Don Detmer Award for informatics health policy contributions. Source: https://academyhealth.org/about/people/theresa-cullen-md-ms Stay Informed Sign up for The Other 80 Newsletter to receive a monthly update with reflections, news, events, jobs and funding curated for you by Claudia. Click here to sign up. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| Health and the Election with Larry Levitt | 30 Oct 2024 | 00:39:03 | |
With the election just days away, Larry Levitt joins me to discuss where Harris and Trump stand on key health issues: reproductive health, affordability and Medicaid. While health has not taken center stage (as it has in the past), the outcome of this election will have profound impacts on every aspect of health in the years ahead. We discuss:
Larry reminds us that health IS an economic issue: “People think of the economy and health care being separate issues, but they're In fact, not separate issues at all. I mean, we spend an enormous amount on health care. A lot of people's household budgets go to health care. So, you know, when you talk about an economic issue, health is an economic issue, issue for people.” Relevant Links KFF panel: What the 2024 election could mean for health coverage, affordability and the budget How medical debt is the canary in the coal mine for health affordability [article] Abortion-related state ballot measures About Our Guest Larry Levitt is the executive vice president for health policy, overseeing KFF’s policy work on Medicare, Medicaid, the health care marketplace, the Affordable Care Act, racial equity, women’s health, and global health. He previously was editor-in-chief of kaisernetwork.org, which was KFF’s online health policy news and information service and directed KFF’s communications. Prior to joining KFF, Levitt served as a senior health policy adviser to the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services, working on the development of the Clinton Administration’s Health Security Act and other health policy initiatives. Earlier, he was the special assistant for health policy with California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, a medical economist with Kaiser Permanente, and served in a number of positions in the Massachusetts state government. Levitt holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Source: https://www.kff.org/person/larry-levitt/ Stay Informed Sign up for The Other 80 Newsletter to receive a monthly update with reflections, news, events, jobs and funding curated for you by Claudia. Click here to sign up. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| A Bold Plan to Increase Life Expectancy in NYC with Dr. Ashwin Vasan | 16 Oct 2024 | 00:42:02 | |
How do you create a healthier city? As the climate shifts, screens dominate our lives and cities continue to grow - urban areas are grappling with how to put themselves on a better track to health. New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan joins The Other 80 to talk about his ambitious plan to increase health in the Big Apple, with the goal of increasing life expectancy from 78 to 83 years. We discuss:
Ashwin shares why youth social media use is such a major public health priority: “ Our kids are hurting … Fifty percent of teens are saying that they are either moderately or severely depressed …It's hard to ignore the role that digital media and social media is playing … And what we found was pretty troubling …The more time you're spending on social media, the worse your self -reported mental health is. Whether it's symptoms of depression, anxiety, hopelessness, fear for the future.” Relevant Links Article: “Using Law to Advance Population Health Management” The City of New York’s Advisory on Social Media More information on Healthy NYC About Our Guest Dr. Ashwin Vasan is the 44th Health Commissioner of New York City. He is a practicing primary care physician, epidemiologist and public health expert with nearly 20 years of experience working to improve physical and mental health, social welfare and public policy outcomes for marginalized populations in New York City, nationally and globally. Throughout his career, he has brought in a unique, unparalleled focus to combating the mental health crisis, releasing a comprehensive citywide mental health plan addressing the second pandemic – a crisis of mental health plaguing youth, vulnerable New Yorkers with severe mental illness, and those impacted by the overdose epidemic. Having begun his career in global health working at Partners in Health and the HIV Department of the World Health Organization, he most recently served as the President and CEO of Fountain House, a US-based mental health nonprofit. He currently serves as faculty at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. Stay Informed Sign up for The Other 80 Newsletter to receive a monthly update with reflections, news, events, jobs and funding curated for you by Claudia. Click here to sign up. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| The Way Out of The Gun Violence Crisis with Dr. Megan Ranney | 02 Oct 2024 | 00:44:34 | |
In July, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a landmark advisory declaring firearm violence a national public health crisis. The advisory builds on decades of work from Dr. Megan Ranney and other researchers who advocate taking a public health approach to reducing firearm violence. She joined us at Aspen Ideas: Health to discuss what this means: namely moving from a focus on law and order to centering harm reduction and prevention. Now, as the Dean of the Yale School of Public Health, Megan is applying the same systems thinking approach to focus on the big changes we need to drive health in the US. We discuss:
Megan says this is the moment for public health reinvention: “This is a moment where we get to reinvent how we study, teach, and most of all, practice public health, not just locally, but also globally, as we come out of the COVID pandemic, and I think there's a real moral clarity, but also a moral imperative for us, as public health professionals, to seize this moment, to take this kind of pivot point that we're at as a field, and to move it forward in a direction that we will be proud of.” Relevant Links Megan Ranney testimony on gun violence as a public health issue Gun violence panel at Aspen Ideas: Health Surgeon General advisory on firearm violence Yale Q&A with Dean Megan Ranney Bipartisan Safer Communities Act UC Berkeley School of Public Health course on urban gun violence prevention More on Rahimi case About Our Guest Dr. Megan L. Ranney is an emergency physician, researcher, and national advocate for innovative approaches to public health. In July 2023, she joined Yale University as Dean of the Yale School of Public Health, where she is also the C.-E. A. Winslow Professor of Public Health. Her research focuses on developing, testing, and disseminating digital health interventions to prevent violence and related behavioral health problems, and on COVID-related risk reduction. She has held multiple national leadership roles, including as co-founder of GetUsPPE during the COVID-19 pandemic and Senior Strategic Advisor to AFFIRM at the Aspen Institute, focused on ending gun violence through a non-partisan public health approach. She was previously the Warren Alpert Endowed Professor of Emergency Medicine, Deputy Dean of the School of Public Health, and Founding Director of the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health at Brown University. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, a Fellow of the Aspen Health Innovators’ Fellowship, and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. She earned her bachelor's degree in history of science, graduating summa cum laude, from Harvard University; her medical doctorate, graduating Alpha Omega Alpha, from Columbia University; and her master’s degree in public health from Brown University. She completed her residency in Emergency Medicine and a fellowship in Injury Prevention Research at Brown University. Source: https://ysph.yale.edu/profile/megan-ranney/ Stay Informed Sign up for The Other 80 Newsletter to receive a monthly update with reflections, news, events, jobs and funding curated for you by Claudia. Click here to sign up. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| A Case for Techno Realism with Deena Shakir | 18 Sep 2024 | 00:35:52 | |
Deena Shakir is an investor who is obsessed with expanding access to the basic health services people need and often can’t access: pediatric care, community health and women’s services. Her journey to investing passed through policymaking, journalism and big tech and her early techno optimism has given way to a much more nuanced and pragmatic view. She is able to see the big opportunities for impact hiding in plain sight. We discuss:
Deena is excited about “asset light” investments that combine new care models – like community health workers – and technology: “There are some things that won't change. And there are things that hopefully tech can help to navigate. And so these asset light models, these models that are leveraging under leveraged care workers – like community health workers that are providing culturally competent care – and at the end of the day, that are improving metrics and outcomes, are the ones that get me excited.” Relevant Links Jonathan Haidt article in The Atlantic titled “Why the past 10 years of American Life have been uniquely stupid” President Obama’s Cairo speech ARPA-H Sprint for Women’s Health Health companies Deena mentions that she invests in: About Our Guest Deena's investments span stages and sectors, and include women's health, digital health infrastructure, health equity, foodtech, and fintech. Above all, she seeks out extraordinary, often underdog, founders on a mission. Prior to Lux, Deena was a Partner at GV (formerly Google Ventures), led product partnerships at Google for health, search, and AI/ML, and directed social impact investments at Google.org. Deena also served as a Presidential Management Fellow at The U.S. Department of State under Secretary Clinton, where she helped launch President Obama’s first Global Entrepreneurship Summit. Deena is a frequent speaker and commentator and has been featured in print and television on Bloomberg, CNBC and NBC, in print in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Techcrunch, Marie Claire, STAT, and more, and has delivered keynote addresses at major industry conferences. She was named a "Top 30 Under 40 in Healthcare" by Business Insider and "Top Senior Woman to Watch in Venture Capital" by the Wall Street Journal in 2021, "Top 50 in Digital Health" by Rock Health and 40 Under 40 by Fortune Magazine in 2022. Source: https://www.luxcapital.com/people/deena-shakir Stay Informed Sign up for The Other 80 Newsletter to receive a monthly update with reflections, news, events, jobs and funding curated for you by Claudia. Click here to sign up. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| Moonshots and Bold Bets with Renee Wegrzyn | 04 Sep 2024 | 00:43:13 | |
Government systems often take a lot of flack for their (sometimes) built-in inability to take risks and make big bets. So, what would it take to encourage the government to take those big, risky moonshots? For Health, that’s the role of ARPA-H – to fund new ways of improving health by investing in people with big ideas. We sat down with ARPA-H Director Renee Wegrzyn at Aspen Ideas Health to talk about how it’s going and what comes next. We discuss:
Renee says ARPA-H gives her the ability to direct funds into areas that are sometimes left off the list of “must haves” for innovation: “...one of the only top down things I've done as a director is said, ‘Why aren't we funding more in women's health? We don't have any program managers in the pipeline that want to exclusively focus on this’. But I think we all inherently understand that women are underrepresented in almost every aspect of health. So I asked our [Program Managers].. who wants to raise [a] hand and pick a topic that is really either unique to women, or is disproportionately affecting women that we can do a sprint and invest around. And so I got six Program Managers to come up with topics, everything from Women's Health at home, to brain health, to understanding and quantifying pain – and through the Investor Catalyst Hub we have worked with investors to understand what kind of convincing scale do we need to get to for you to be the second investor. And we competed this across the country.” Relevant Links
About Our Guest Dr. Renee Wegrzyn is the first director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), appointed by President Biden on October 11, 2022. Previously, she was the Vice President of Business Development at Ginkgo Bioworks and Head of Innovation at Concentric by Ginkgo, where she focused on synthetic biology for combating infectious diseases like COVID-19. Wegrzyn has experience with DARPA and IARPA, the models for ARPA-H. At DARPA, she used synthetic biology and gene editing to enhance biosecurity and the bioeconomy, managing programs like Living Foundries, Safe Genes, PREPARE, and DIGET. She received the Superior Public Service Medal for her DARPA work. Her career includes leading biosecurity and gene therapy teams in private industry, developing immunoassays and diagnostics. Wegrzyn has served on various scientific advisory boards, including those for the National Academies and the Air Force Research Labs. She holds a Ph.D. and a bachelor's degree in applied biology from the Georgia Institute of Technology and completed postdoctoral training in Heidelberg, Germany, as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. Source: https://arpa-h.gov/about/people/renee-wegrzyn#:~:text=Dr.,Biden. Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| The Crisis in Affordable Housing with Jeff Olivet | 24 Jul 2024 | 00:45:33 | |
The US is living through an affordable housing crisis - in fact, we are short millions and millions of affordable housing units. During the pandemic, homelessness flattened with an influx of resources to help keep people housed. But, those resources have long expired and now we are seeing an uptick in homelessness across the country. Jeff Olivet, the director of USICH (United States Interagency Council on Homelessness), says the problem is complex – but the math isn’t. We need more affordable housing. We discuss:
Jeff reminds us that the people affected most by the affordable housing crisis are those who have experienced trauma and domestic violence: “50 years ago, we still had domestic violence, we still had addiction, we still had mental illness, and we didn't have perfect systems to address that – but we had enough housing for everybody, and we did not see homelessness on the scale we see it today. So when we're responding to homelessness, it's critical to individualize support for people to make sure they have access to the care they need in terms of health and mental health and recovery and all of those important things. But if we don't solve the underlying structural stuff, the lack of affordable housing, the ongoing discrimination that people of color and LGBTQ people face in jobs and trying to buy a home or rent a home in the criminal legal system, in education, if we don't solve that underlying stuff, we're gonna keep seeing homelessness for a very long time to come.” Relevant Links Jeff Olivet testimony to Congress on strategies to reduce Veteran homelessness Federal actions to increase housing supply and lower housing costs HUD-VASH vouchers to support homeless veterans USICH guidance document for healthcare Article about the SCOTUS ruling About Our Guest Jeff Olivet is the executive director of USICH. He has worked to prevent and end homelessness for more than 25 years as a street outreach worker, case manager, coalition builder, researcher, and trainer. He is the founder of jo consulting, co-founder of Racial Equity Partners, and from 2010 to 2018, he served as CEO of C4 Innovations. He has worked extensively in the areas of homelessness and housing, health and behavioral health, HIV, education, and organizational development. Jeff has been principal investigator on multiple research studies funded by private foundations and the National Institutes of Health. Jeff is deeply committed to social justice, racial equity, gender equality, and inclusion for all. He has a bachelor's from the University of Alabama and a master's from Boston College. Source: https://www.usich.gov/about/staff Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| California Tackles Healthcare Affordability with Elizabeth Mitchell | 10 Jul 2024 | 00:41:17 | |
California is the latest state to address healthcare affordability through cost growth targets. Elizabeth Mitchell – President and CEO of Purchaser Business Group on Health – Joins us to discuss the nuts and bolts of the 3% cost growth target recently adopted by the state. Healthcare affordability is a big issue across the country. More than half of us skip or postpone care due to cost and medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcy. Reining in medical costs is also how we’ll free up resources for what we know works to build health in America: prevention, addressing the social drivers and fostering health in communities. We discuss:
Elizabeth reminds us how troubling it is that we don’t have clear prices in a sector that makes up 20% of the economy: “The idea that you can't find out what something is going to cost before you agree to it is outrageous. Name any other industry that refuses to show you a price. It is incredible to me that we are still fighting about transparency when it is 20 % of the US economy. I mean, this is a multi-trillion-dollar industry who feels no accountability to show pricing. So, I just think it is incredible that we do not have meaningful transparency yet.” Relevant Links California’s Office of Health Care Affordability sets cost growth target Federal hospital price transparency requirements Purchaser Business Group on Health (PBGH) website PBGH white paper on advanced primary care About Our Guest As President and CEO, Elizabeth Mitchell advances Purchaser Business Group on Health’s (PBGH’s) strategic focus areas of advanced primary care, functional markets and purchasing value. Mitchell leads PBGH in mobilizing health care purchasers, elevating the role and impact of primary care, and creating functional health care markets to support high-quality affordable care, achieving measurable impacts on outcomes and affordability. At PBGH, Elizabeth leverages her extensive experience in working with health care purchasers, providers, policymakers and payers to improve health care quality and cost. She previously served as Senior Vice President for Healthcare and Community Health Transformation at Blue Shield of California, during which time she designed Blue Shield’s strategy for transforming practice, payment and community health. Mitchell also served as the President and CEO of the Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement (NRHI), a network of regional quality improvement and measurement organizations. She also served as CEO of Maine’s business coalition on health (the Maine Health Management Coalition), worked within an integrated delivery system (MaineHealth), and was elected to the Maine State Legislature, serving as a State Representative. Elizabeth served as Vice Chairperson of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee, Board and Executive Committee Member of the National Quality Forum (NQF), Member of the National Academy of Medicine’s “Vital Signs” Study Committee on core metrics and a Guiding Committee Member for the Health Care Payment Learning & Action Network. Elizabeth holds a degree in religion from Reed College and studied social policy at the London School of Economics. Source: https://www.pbgh.org/staff/elizabeth-mitchell/ Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| Revisiting CalAIM with Dr. Palav Babaria | 26 Jun 2024 | 00:41:23 | |
The scope, scale and timeline of what California is trying to do with CalAIM is truly breathtaking. Two years after the launch of the ambitious program, which offers integrated medical and social care for California's 15 million Medicaid members, Dr. Palav Babaria joins us to discuss how it’s going and what comes next. Dr. Babaria is a primary care physician who leads quality and population health management for California’s Medicaid program, Medi-Cal. We discuss:
Palav reminds us that CalAIM was built through listening: “Not everyone may know this, but CalAIM was generated from a statewide listening tour. Our previous state Medicaid director went around the state and literally asked communities… rooms full of plans, members, providers, what do you need from Medi-Cal that isn't working today? [The] smorgasbord of recommendations is what turned into CalAIM … Listening to the community and responding to the community's needs is in the core DNA of this program.” Relevant Links
About Our Guest Dr. Palav Babaria was appointed Chief Quality Officer and Deputy Director of Quality and Population Health Management of the California Department of Health Care Services beginning in March 2021. She was formerly the Chief Administrative Officer of Ambulatory Services at Alameda Health System. In that capacity, she operationally and clinically oversaw 26 specialty clinics, four large primary care FQHCs, specialty and integrated behavioral health, and is responsible for all outpatient value-based payment programs. Prior to that role, she served as Medical Director of K6 Adult Medicine Clinic. She also has over a decade of global health experience and her work has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Academic Medicine, Social Science & Medicine, L.A. Times, and New York Times. Her areas of interest include ambulatory transformation in resource-limited settings, shifting to value-based care, and issues of gender in medicine. Babaria received her bachelor’s from Harvard College, as well as her MD and Masters in Health Science from Yale University. She completed her residency training in internal medicine and global health fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco Source: https://carolemmottfoundation.org/fellow/palav-babaria-md-mhs/ Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| Community Social Capital with Dr. Rishi Manchanda | 12 Jun 2024 | 00:39:39 | |
To achieve whole person care, we can try layering new social services on top of medical care. But Dr. Rishi Manchanda believes we should move further upstream and ask, what will it take to actually improve health in communities? From founding Rx the Vote to HealthBegins, Rishi is committed to building community social capital in America. We discuss:
Rishi thinks all public health students should study and know how to shift the political determinants of health: “I think we can recognize there's ways to… get the dollars out the door, get the services out the door, get the access that we need while [also building] local governance. And I think that's what I see as a really interesting opportunity for us in California… There are opportunities here for public health schools, including Berkeley, to [help] public health students… understand the political determinants of health and then understand their role [to]... address them and improve them.” Relevant Links Rishi’s book The Upstream Doctors Rishi's TEDx Talk: "What Makes Us Get Sick? Look Upstream." New collaborative community health planning model in California Policy requiring California Medicaid health plans to invest 5-7.5% of profits into local communities California Medicaid investments in practice transformation Kaiser Permanente's health, housing and justice initiative An interview with Rishi Manchanda About Our Guest Dr. Manchanda is Founder and President of HealthBegins, a social enterprise that provides training, clinic redesign, and technology to transform health care and the social determinants of health. Dr. Manchanda is a dual board-certified internist and pediatrician, a board member of the National Physicians Alliance, and a fellow in the California Health Care Foundation’s Healthcare Leadership Program. He is the lead physician for homeless primary care at the VA in Los Angeles, where he has built clinics for high-utilizer homeless veterans with complex chronic disease. Dr. Manchanda was the first Director of Social Medicine and Health Equity at a large community health center network in south Los Angeles. In 2008, he started RxDemocracy, a nonpartisan coalition that has registered over 30,000 voters in doctors’ offices and hospitals nationwide. His 2013 book, “The Upstream Doctors,” introduces a new model of the health care workforce that includes clinical “Upstreamists” who address social determinants of health. Source: https://sirenetwork.ucsf.edu/staff/rishi-manchanda Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| From Data to Impact with Dr. Maya Petersen | 29 May 2024 | 00:40:13 | |
June 18th is “Maya Petersen” day in San Francisco, in honor of her work building disease models that guided the region through the early days of COVID and saved countless lives. With projects spanning from developing HIV prevention strategies in East Africa to shaping new Medicaid models in California, the UC Berkeley epidemiologist is building a future where local public health leaders have the tools and data to ask and answer complex policy decisions in real time. Now that’s a world I want to live in. We discuss:
San Francisco’s Director of Health, Grant Colfax, taught her an important lesson about showing up and helping: “I remember… saying, ‘You know what? You really need to find somebody who's an expert in this, I'm not an expert in this.’ And he said, ‘Okay, Maya, but if you're gonna find me someone it needs to be in the next 24 hours, because I need help.’ And it was just a reminder that, you know, you're not always going to be an expert, sometimes you just need to show up, do your best… be clear about your uncertainty and communicate well, and that can be… a big service” Relevant Links Local Epidemic Modeling for the San Francisco Department of Public Health San Francisco’s COVID strategy Multi-sectorial Approach to HIV in East Africa Maya Petersen Day in San Francisco About Our Guest Dr. Maya L. Petersen is Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Petersen’s methodological research focuses on the development and application of novel causal inference methods to problems in health, with an emphasis on longitudinal data and adaptive treatment strategies (dynamic regimes), machine learning methods, adaptive designs, and study design and analytic strategies for cluster randomized trials. She is a Founding Editor of the Journal of Causal Inference and serves on the editorial board of Epidemiology. Her applied work focuses on developing and evaluating improved HIV prevention and care strategies. She currently serves as co-PI (with Dr. Diane Havlir and Dr. Moses Kamya) for the Sustainable East Africa Research in Community Health consortium, and as co-PI (with Dr. Elvin Geng) for the ADAPT-R study (a sequential multiple assignment randomized trial of behavioral interventions to optimize retention in HIV care). Source: https://publichealth.berkeley.edu/people/maya-petersen Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||
| How NC Changed Its Mind on Medicaid Expansion with Kody Kinsley | 15 May 2024 | 00:38:15 | |
If there’s one thing politicians do little of these days it’s change their minds. But, that’s exactly what North Carolina’s General Assembly did in 2023. Ten years after the ACA was passed, and in a historic bipartisan move, they changed their minds and voted to expand Medicaid. NC Secretary of Health & Human Services Kody Kinsley joined us to talk about what it took to get this done and how it’s been going so far. We discuss:
Kody points out NC’s strategy of investing in community organizations is creating both health and economic opportunities: “75% of our community based organizations are minority or women owned throughout those 33 counties. So, this isn't just about getting good access to what drives health in the long run. This is also about building that infrastructure and having a financing model that sustains it that is in the balance, a good value for the taxpayer.” Relevant Links About Our Guest Kody Kinsley serves as North Carolina’s Secretary of Health & Human Services, overseeing a department with over 18,000 staff and a $38 billion budget. With experience centered on health policy and operations, Kinsley worked on digital healthcare transformation, national education and labor policies, and served as COO and CFO of the U.S. Treasury. Secretary Kinsley’s three priorities for the department include: Investing in behavioral health and resilience, improving child and family well-being, and building a strong and inclusive workforce. Under his leadership, North Carolina expanded Medicaid and received the largest investment to bolster the mental health system in over a decade. Kinsley grew up in Wilmington, earning his bachelor’s degree from Brevard College and his master’s in Public Policy from the University of California at Berkeley. Source: https://www.ncdhhs.gov/about/leadership/kody-kinsley Connect With Us For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn. | |||