Plenary Sessions - Integrated Care Conference

Our Community at the Intersection of COVID-19 & Black Lives Matter: Reflections on 2020 & Where We Go Next

Deepu George

Panelist

Deepu George

Deepu George, PhD, is an LMFT in charge of a PCBH program at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Family Medicine residency program. He is a passionate advocate for social justice issues, redesigned medical training and is a contributing voice to the CFHA podcast.

Monica Harrison

Panelist

Monica Harrison

Monica Williams Harrison is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker that provides consultation for agencies around Integrated Care and practices Integrated Care at Hartford Healthcare. Monica is also the National Association of Social Workers Board Director Representative for Region II (Connecticut and New York City).

Jeffery Ring

Panelist

Jeffery Ring

Dr. Ring is a health psychologist, speaker and author who has dedicated his career to health equity and the eradication of racism. He works on projects related to enlightened leadership, high functioning teams, behavioral health integration, implicit bias training and health practitioner resilience and vitality.

Neftali Serrano

Moderator

Neftali Serrano

Dr. Serrano is the Chief Executive Officer of the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association. He is a clinical psychologist with 19 years of primary care integration experience and is passionate about supporting healthcare professionals working on transforming the healthcare delivery system.

Andy Valeras

Panelist

Andy Valeras

Andy Valeras, MD, is the President of the Board for the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association and is passionate advocate for asking “wicked questions” and thinking with the lens of complexity science. As a family physician he has championed integrated care in his work within residency training programs.

Eboni Winford

Panelist

Eboni Winford

Eboni Winford, Ph.D. is the Director of Research and Health Equity and a licensed psychologist/Behavioral Health Consultant at Cherokee Health Systems in Knoxville, TN. Dr. Winford provides clinical care to patients in primary care settings while supporting the development and implementation of initiatives designed to achieve health equity for CHS patients through translational research, clinical practices, and education.

This visually inspired panel session will begin with reflections from each panelist, using pictures and data, to reflect on where we have been as a community of champions of integrated care. The five panelists from within the CFHA community will provide their reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protest movement and will challenge each other and the CFHA community to rise to the challenges of the moment in a sustained fashion. Participants will be encouraged to reflect on their own experiences and engage the panelists in answering the hard questions of where we go from here. A key focus of the panel will be identifying key action steps across the continuum of the systems of healthcare delivery and policymaking (eg. CLAS standards implementation, revisioning quality metrics, Telehealth maintenance plans etc.).

Our American Dilemma: Placing an Equity Lens on the Struggle for Diversity and Inclusion

Will Ross

Will Ross, MD, MPH is associate dean for diversity, principal officer for community partnerships, and alumni endowed professor of medicine in the Division of Nephrology at Washington University School of Medicine. While overseeing diversity and community affairs over the past two decades, Dr. Ross has recruited and developed a diverse group of medical students, residents and faculty.

With the backdrop of the protests over police brutality against minorities in 2020, and in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic which unveiled marked health disparities, physician Will Ross will talk about the ongoing struggle to achieve inclusivity and diversity in healthcare and its relationship to the goal of health equity for all.  Dr. Ross argues that as public health leaders have declared the epidemic of gun violence in America a public health threat, they must similarly call out the root cause of police brutality towards people of color and the devastating impact of COVID-19 on the African American, Latino, and Native American populations. Embracing racism as a public health crisis requires affirming racism as a structural determinant of health and developing a strategic plan to unravel and excise it from the fabric of our community.

Nudge Units: Creating Healthcare Architecture To Improve Quality 

Mitesh Patel

Mitesh S. Patel, MD, MBA is Director of the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit, the world’s first behavioral design team embedded within a health system. He is the Ralph Muller PresidentialAssistant Professor of Medicine and Health Care Management at the Perelman School of Medicine and The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is aStaffPhysician at the Crescenz VA Medical Center in Philadelphia.

How do we improve healthcare delivery without restricting clinician choices? Our speaker, Mitesh Patel, MD thinks behavioral “nudges” are the key. His team at Penn Medicine pioneered the concept of “nudge units” where “the goals are to improve health care value and outcomes, advance knowledge about how to best implement nudges for impact, evaluate our efforts, and disseminate our findings. Ideas are generated by health system leadership, front-line clinicians and staff, and members of the unit itself.” 

Health Policy After the Election and COVID-19: A Panel

Len M. Nichols

Panelist

Len M. Nichols

Len M. Nichols in a non-resident Fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., and an Emeritus Professor of Health Policy at George Mason University. For the past 10 years he was the Director of the Center for Health Policy Research and Ethics at George Mason. He has been intimately involved in health reform debates, policy development, and communication with the media and policy makers for 20+ years, after he was Senior Advisor for Health Policy at the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton Administration. He has consistently sought to add moral arguments to the technical health policy debate.

Dan Gorenstein

Moderator

Dan Gorenstein

Dan Gorenstein is Executive Producer and co-host of the Tradeoffs podcast, Mediamaker-in-Residence at the Annenberg School for Communication, and LDI Adjunct Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Tradeoffs combines compelling stories and rigorous research to explore solutions to some of health care’s toughest challenges. Before launching the podcast, Mr. Gorenstein was the senior reporter for Marketplace’s Health Desk, covering the business of health care. Previously, he was a reporter for New Hampshire Public Radio. He holds a BA from Earlham College.

Rodney Whitlock

Panelist

Rodney Whitlock

Rodney is an accomplished health care executive with more than two decades on the Hill where he specialized in rural health, the health care safety net and disability policy. With nearly 25 years of experience, Rodney possesses and offers clients the kind of knowledge that is uniquely available to those who have drafted and advanced legislation. He strategically guides clients through dense Medicare and Medicaid issues that have significant business impact.

Instead of debating ACA+ vs. Repeal and Replace 3.0, COVID-19 and our nation’s varied responses to it have altered many landscapes, some permanently. The weaknesses of employment-based insurance, the limits of rugged individualism, the dangers of anti-science agitation and the reverberating consequences of multi-dimensional socio-economic inequities are things that cannot be unseen. The political risk of government overreach is also dangerously heightened. How to fashion a broader American policy consensus out of these real time lessons coming at us relentlessly, for a polarized electorate, that is the question before us all.

October 2020 will represent a historic juncture in healthcare policy given the COVID-19 pandemic and the upcoming presidential election. What is in store for healthcare in the United States given various outcomes? Join our panelists, representing liberal and conservative values and our moderator as they explore the future of healthcare policy in America.