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.