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.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Hal Wolf, President and CEO of HIMSS - the Health Information Management Systems Society which seeks to advance information technology in health care. He discusses the upcoming HIMSS 2019 Global Conference, the largest gathering of its kind in the world on topics such as Artificial Intelligence, Voice Technology, Cybersecurity and Blockchain which are expected to dominate this year's event.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter look back at some of the most memorable guests from 2018, which included thought leaders in areas such as CRISPR gene editing technology, Artificial Intelligence and Voice in health care, the rise of innovative care delivery models as well as the transformation in health profession training. They also welcomed award-winning investigative journalists who exposed the dark side of the health industry in which corporations profited from defrauding the public and putting patients' lives at risk, from the Theranos scandal to the industry-driven opioid crisis.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. John Moore, Medical Director of Fitbit, on their newly launched Fitbit Care - a digitally supported personal health and fitness coaching platform that provides personalized support 24/7. Dr. Moore talks about the platform's ability to help participants set achievable goals, linking their real time data to health coaches through their digital technology.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Norman Sharpless, Director of the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health. They discuss the accelerated pace of discovery in cancer research driven by genomics, big data analytics and personalized oncology. He also stresses the need to address fragmented pockets of research for more rapid deployment of treatment breakthroughs.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with renowned addiction expert Dr. Tom McLellan, Founder and CEO of the Treatment Research Institute, committed to promoting evidence-based approaches to drug treatment and drug policy. He discusses addiction as a chronic disorder, the effectiveness of Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) for opioid and alcohol addiction, and the need to improve addiction medicine training for clinicians and health care providers.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Shelley Lyford, CEO of the Gary and Mary West Foundation which is dedicated to reducing costs and improving care for America's seniors. She discusses the launch of Civica Rx - a not for profit entity that will supply low-cost generic drugs to a consortium of partner foundations and hospitals to disrupt monopolies and price gouging in the pharmaceutical industry.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Intermountain Healthcare of Utah's CEO Emeritus Dr. Charles Sorenson, who discusses Intermountain's innovative, integrated care delivery system committed to improved outcomes and contained costs. He is Founding Director of the Intermountain Healthcare Leadership Institute which seeks to train future clinician leaders in their team-based model of care delivery.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, who has launched a new climate change project at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment, C-CHANGE, is a partnership between Harvard and Google aimed at advancing better understanding of the causes and effects of climate change and its impact on population health.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Sachin Jain, CEO of CareMore Health, a coordinated and integrated health care system focused on high-use Medicare and Medicaid patients. Dr. Jain discusses CareMore's team-based approach to chronic disease management deploying ride-sharing and meal delivery services, loneliness prevention and patient support across the care continuum.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Mona Siddiqui, Chief Data Officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, who is overseeing a transformation in health information sharing between all agencies at HHS. She discusses the infrastructure changes required to facilitate data liquidity, and growing partnerships with outside entrepreneurs to expedite the process.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Donald Warne, Director of Indians Into Medicine (INMED) at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences. He discusses the impact of cultural trauma on the American Indian population, strategies for addressing health disparities and the need to mentor Native youth in the health professions.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Pulitzer Prize winning writer Barry Meier, author of "Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic," on Purdue Pharma, makers of the narcotic OxyContin, and the pivotal role they played in "the greatest public health crisis of the 21st Century."

This week hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. David Blumenthal, President of the Commonwealth Fund, a philanthropy dedicated to research supporting a high-functioning health care system. He discusses expanded coverage under the Affordable Care Act, the vital role of the HITECH Act in adoption of electronic health records in the US, and the Fund's ongoing research comparing US health costs to other countries.

This week on Conversations on Health Care, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. David Hemenway, Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He has spent decades researching America's gun violence epidemic, its root causes, the casualties and public health and legal policies that would mitigate the problem.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Peter O'Neill, Executive Director of Cleveland Clinic Innovations, the commercialization branch of Cleveland Clinic dedicated to bringing clinicians' inventions to the marketplace. Mr. O'Neill discusses the system that supports the clinicians/inventors, Cleveland Clinic's global expansion, and their annual list of technologies that will disrupt health care.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Maria Neira, Director of the Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health at the World Health Organization, on their recent report on pollution's impact on global health leading to more deaths than HIV, Malaria and TB combined. She discusses the Paris Climate Accord as an important step in addressing the effects of climate change on human health, the ongoing battle to contain HIV/AIDS and how the WHO is better prepared for pandemics like Ebola.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Larry Smarr, Founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. A physicist and computer scientist, Dr. Smarr discusses his pioneering research in the "quantified self" movement, outlining efforts to quantify all of his genomic and biomedical information to discover new ways to predict and prevent human disease.