As of October 6, 2022, all health care organizations in the United States are legally required to give patients unrestricted access to all their health records in a digital format.

Micky Tripathi, Ph.D., National Coordinator for Health IT at the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, is excited about this change and its ability to empower patients. Yet the free flow of data also poses security risks. He tells hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter what protections Americans can take and the incredible opportunities health IT offers us during this time of medical challenges.

The U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs operates the nation’s largest integrated health care system. But how much do you know about how well VA Medical Centers and clinics identify innovative therapies, practices and policies and then diffuse them across a large footprint?

Ryan Vega, MD, MSHA, leads the Innovation Ecosystem within the Veterans Health Administration. This initiative focuses on being the catalyst for enabling the discovery and spread of mission-driven health care innovation to advance care delivery and service.

Dr. Vega highlights point-of-care manufacturing and its 3D Printing Network that were essential during the early days of COVID and the VA’s history of deploying the first cardiac pacemaker.

Conversations on Health Care hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter talk to Dr. Vega about these breakthroughs, how they help the entire health care sector and where the VA is partnering with Federally Qualified Health Centers.

Joseph Allen is the director of the Healthy Buildings Program at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. As the co-author of “Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity,” his views are closely followed as we try to move quicker than COVID can spread.

“Conversations on Health Care” co-hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter talk with Allen about new efforts to elevate the quality of indoor spaces in an overall health strategy.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Farzad Mostashari, Founder and CEO of Aledade, former National Coordinator for Health IT, and Chair of the COVID-19 Symptom Data Challenge, a partnership with Facebook Data for Good, Carnegie Melon, Duke, University of Maryland, Resolve to Save Lives and organized by Catalyst @Health 2.0. The challenge is encouraging developers to create tools to mine data submitted by tens of millions of Facebook users, tracking real time COVID-19 symptoms to identify potential pandemic hotspots, for better epidemiological forecasting.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Daniel Kraft, physician-scientist, inventor, entrepreneur and Chair of the XPrize Pandemic Alliance Task Force, which is holding competitions to develop better tools for addressing COVID-19. Dr. Kraft, who is also founder and Executive Director of Exponential Medicine, looks at emerging developments that will lead to better rapid tests, masks as well as tech and AI-enabled interventions that will offer earlier diagnosis of infection, and better treatment and management of diseases like coronavirus in the future.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. William Haseltine, President of ACCESS Health International, a global health think tank. He is also a renowned scientist, entrepreneur, philanthropist and founder of Harvard Medical School’s HIV/AIDS and cancer research centers. He discusses his two new books: A Family Guide to COVID: Questions and Answers for Parents, Grandparents and Children, and A COVID Back To School Guide which are continually-updating ‘living e-books’ offering answers to the many questions families have about how to navigate their way through the pandemic.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Eric Topol, Founder and Director of the Scripps Translational Institute, and author of “The Creative Destruction of Medicine”. Dr. Topol is a renowned cardiologist and health data champion, and shares a harsh assessment of federal handling of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the US. He’s heartened by the many collaborations yielding significant scientific discovery around rapid testing technology and vaccines. He’s concerned the anti-science movement will undermine deployment of an effective vaccination program, once one makes it to the public.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Zeke Emanuel, Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. A former advisor to the Obama Administration, he predicts the pandemic won’t be fully brought under control until late next year, when an approved vaccine can be successfully deployed across hundreds of millions of Americans. He discusses his new book, “Which Country Has the Best Healthcare” addressing the failure of America’s leadership to adequately address the pandemic.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Michael Osterholm, world-renowned epidemiologist, pandemic expert and Director of the Center for Infectious Disease, Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. The author of The Deadliest Enemy: Our War with Killer Germs, Dr Osterholm has warned for years of the likelihood of a pandemic such as COVID-19.He extols the need for ongoing measures to protect the public health and front line health care workers through mask use, social distancing and tests, and the herculean scientific efforts to produce treatments and a vaccine.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. John Halamka, President of the Mayo Clinic Platform, a partnership with Google and multiple entities to improve healthcare through better data. He recently launched the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition, with more than 800 private sector and academic partners collaborating on multiple fronts to combat COVID-19. They discuss the “five phases” to a “new normal” including isolation, infection and antibody testing, contact tracing and vaccine development as precursors fully reopening society.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome engineer, data analyst and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tomas Pueyo, whose recent collection of articles in the online publication Medium outline what must be done to contain COVID-19, and minimize the harm to health and economies. He analyzes global data on actions taken by countries and their impact on outcomes, recommending that widespread testing, contract tracing, physical distancing, hand hygiene and widespread use of masks will help contain the pandemic.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Joseph Kvedar, President-Elect of the American Telemedicine Association and Sr. Advisor for Virtual Care at Partners Health Care in Boston. A pioneer in the telehealth movement, he talks about the evolving role of telehealth and remote monitoring, especially against the backdrop of the current pandemic leading to quarantines, and the growing adoption of telemedicine throughout the American health system.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with US Senator Bill Cassidy (R) LA, on the bipartisan bill he co-sponsored aimed at protecting personal health information from industry profiteering. He discusses the “Smartwatch Data Act” which seeks to protect data generated on smart watches, personal electronic devices and genomics testing, to give patients more control over how their data is used for commercial gain.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Noelle LaCharite Principal Program Manager for Applied AI and Cognitive Services at Microsoft, and one of the original voice 'skills' developers for Amazon's Alexa. She talks about the promise of applied AI, machine learning and voice technology systems which enable coders, developers or anyone to create their own applications and voice skills to enhance and advance the health care experience.

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

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Andrea McGonigle, National Managing Director of Microsoft's Health and Life Science Division, where she runs a team seeking to develop technologies that will enhance patient engagement. She talks about the need for more coordination between stakeholders seeking to improve the healthcare experience, the need for cloud compliance and safety and the future of health care.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Jennifer Goldsack, Interim Executive Director of the newly-launched Digital Medicine Society, or DiMe, the first organization dedicated to providing guidelines for the emerging reality of digital technology in health care. She talks about the need for creating agreed-upon standards, guidelines and best practices to ensure that digital health technologies live up to their promise of improving health care delivery, research and outcomes without doing any harm.

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

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

This week hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speaks with renowned health industry analyst Susannah Fox who served as Chief Technology Officer at the US Department of Health and Human Services. Ms. Fox has been studying the growing impact of the internet on health care and discusses her recent report on how young health consumers are accelerating the adoption of digital technologies in the health care experience.