Every month on the Inside Health Care podcast, the NCQA Communications team interviews the health care industry's most prolific thought leaders to extract their secrets on how they work to improve health care quality. Listeners can count on us for up-to-date information on everything from delivery reform to patient experience.
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Inside Health Care #70: NCQA President Peggy O'Kane & the State of Health Care 2021
In 2021, the pandemic continued to test our health system.
In this episode of "Inside Health Care" featuring NCQA's President, Peggy O'Kane, we look back at how the pandemic brought challenges but also inspired innovation. In this chat with NCQA's Vice President of Public Policy and External Relations, Frank Micciche, Peggy looks back at the uneasiness of 2021…before looking ahead, with hope, at the year to come.
Inside Health Care #69: Dr. Susan Beane on Closing Equity Gaps on a Larger Scale
Inside Health Care #68: Dr. Lisa Cooper & Bridging Equity Gaps with Better Listening
This episode of "Inside Health Care" features Dr. Lisa A. Cooper, a pioneer in closing the gaps that still persist in health care equity.
Dr. Lisa A. Cooper is an internist, a health services researcher, and a social epidemiologist. A recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2007, Dr. Cooper pioneered methods of measuring racial and ethnic disparities in the quality of communication and relationships between doctors and patients and of implementing community-engaged interventions to overcome disparities in health and health care.
A faculty member at Johns Hopkins University since 1994, Dr. Cooper founded the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, bringing together scientific minds from many areas of research with the goal of ENDING health disparities everywhere. It is her social activism, coupled with her clinical and scientific expertise in bridging the gaps in health equity, that led to Dr. Cooper's appointment this year to President Biden's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
In our discussion with Dr. Cooper, we cover a lot of ground: her incredible research into doctor/patient relationships; how the pandemic exposed long-standing issues in equitable treatment; and a bit about her contributions so far as a newly-appointed science advisor to President Biden.
Later on, we hear some insights from NCQA President Peggy O'Kane on the health care model known as "Hospital at Home." Following that, an update on NCQA's newest product, our Health Equity Accreditation program.
Inside Health Care #67: Dr. Renee Towne & Dr. Niam Yaraghi on What to Do with the Data You Crunch
Everybody knows how annoying it can be when a doctor sits you down and asks you a ton of irrelevant questions, sometimes with their nose in their laptop, before even examining you. On this podcast, we talk a lot about the 'Digitalization of health.' But once someone gathers the data, crunches the numbers, then sends them to the right people, what's next?
For answers, in this episode on Inside Health Care, we talk with data-crunching experts Dr. Renee Towne and Dr. Niam Yaraghi.
Dr. Renee Towne is Director of Quality Programs for KPI Ninja, a company that helps health care institutions deliver better outcomes with a good dose of analytics.
Dr. Niam Yaraghi is Assistant Professor of Business Technology at the University of Miami and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Technology Innovation. His research focuses on the economics of health information technologies.
After this interview, we continue our observance of National Diabetes Month with a clip from podcast episode 66, featuring NCQA's Vice President for Performance Measurement Dr. Mary Barton talking about our new Kidney Health Toolkit. Feel free to go back and check out our earlier episodes any time at blog.ncqa.org.
Finally, we feature a chat with NCQA President Peggy O'Kane, giving an intro to our new Data Aggregator Validation program. For more on that groundbreaking program, click here.
Inside Health Care #66: Dr. Dan Wilson & Dr. Mary Barton on NCQA's Kidney Health Toolkit & a Deeper Dive into Diabetes
This week's episode of NCQA's Inside Health Care podcast observes National Diabetes Month. We feature a discussion with two experts in diabetes care who discuss the links between diabetes diagnosis and kidney disease. Following that, we have a chat with NCQA President Peggy O'Kane about moving Health Equity solutions to the top of U.S. health care agenda.
More than 37 million adults in the U.S. have chronic kidney disease, but because so many are asymptomatic, most of them don't know they have it. Bayer recently teamed up with NCQA to develop a Kidney Health Toolkit, an amazing package of materials that helps providers and agencies teach the link between chronic kidney health and related conditions, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Dr. Daniel Wilson, MD, is Senior Medical Director at Bayer Pharmaceuticals. Following over 25 years as a clinical cardiologist and nephrologist, Dr. Wilson served as the Medical Lead Clinician for Pfizer before joining biopharmaceutical company Relypsa as Executive Medical Director for Medical Affairs. His work led to the development of many significant medications taken by millions of people each day.
Dr. Mary Barton, MD, serves as NCQA's Vice President for Performance Measurement. In her role, Dr. Barton oversees the development, use and maintenance of techniques NCQA uses to evaluate health care quality. She ensures the scientific integrity of NCQA measurement and research. She also leads NCQA in winning and executing health care quality measurement contracts for federal and state governments.
Prior to NCQA, Barton worked for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), where she was the scientific director of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF). She supported and provided oversight for the methodological, evidence review and recommendation-making work of the USPSTF. Before joining AHRQ, Barton was an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, her alma mater, where she performed clinical epidemiology and health services research related to cancer screening and prevention in terms of access, test performance and outcomes.
Inside Health Care #65: Dr. Rachel Harrington on Health Equity and "What's Measured...Matters."
Why do the issues of Health Equity persist? If agencies and NGOs have spent years identifying gaps in care for minority groups in the U.S., what needs to be done to solve these issues, once and for all?
Enter NCQA Research Scientist Dr. Rachel Harrington. In the paper titled "An Equity Agenda for the Field of Health Care Quality Improvement," published in mid-September 2021 by the National Academy of Medicine, Dr. Harrington, along with NCQA President Peggy O'Kane and other Health Care leaders, discuss the origins and continuing factors that seem to perpetuate gaps in Health Equity in the U.S.
In this episode's chat with NCQA Director of Communications Matt Brock, Dr. Harrington gives honest answers to these questions. From outdated social norms to institutional racism, from inaccurate social determinants of health to patient distrust of the overall health care system, Dr. Harrington examines these issues while focusing on progress being made and the road ahead.
We also hear a conversation between NCQA President Peggy O'Kane and Vice President for Public Policy and External Relations Frank Micciche on the immediate need for improvements in health disparities and the progress being made to bridge these gaps.
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JoshCrist , 03/25/2021
Thoughtful, insightful and actionable! 🙌
Whether you're well established as someone innovating in the healthcare ecosystem, or just getting started as a catalyst for change - this is a must-listen podcast for you! Matt and the entire NCQA team do an incredible job leading conversations that cover a huge breadth of topics related to the ins and outs of navigating the cutting edge topics shaping medicine today. Highly recommend listening and subscribing!
mberry99 , 10/03/2019
Great intro to health care quality leaders
Pithy and fun conversations with leaders across the health caresector
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