Healthy Conversations: Recent Episodes
CVS Health
Healthy Conversations brings health care experts together with CVS Health leaders for open discussions via video and podcast on timely topics like COVID-19 and insight into both the challenges facing the frontlines and the emerging innovations that will ultimately transform the industry.
In recognition of Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, today we’re re-releasing a special two-part episode with Dr. Seth Feuerstein, a psychiatrist and researcher who’s made the study and treatment of suicide his life’s work. Dr. Feuerstein is the CEO of Oui Therapeutics, which is building life-saving digital therapeutics to help in preventing suicide. He and our host, Dr. Daniel Kraft, have a wide-ranging discussion about misconceptions, data and innovations in suicide prevention. Dr. Feuerstein also challenges the way health care professionals think about suicide. “The suicidal state of the brain is a lot like the arrhythmia state of the heart,” he says. “It’s a relatively spontaneous period where there’s an elevated risk of sudden death.” Reframing our thinking about suicide in this way, Dr. Feuerstein explains, will make it easier for clinicians to talk about it.
Cara McNulty, President of Behavioral Health and Mental Well-being at CVS Health®, introduces this episode by looking at the latest reporting from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which says suicide rates in the U.S. are again on the rise. She discusses how CVS Health is using a systematic approach to reduce suicide attempts and raise awareness of suicide prevention.
Suicide prevention resources
- CVS Health mental health resources
- Oui Therapeutics
- American Foundation for Suicide Prevention
- Mental Health First Aid
- The Trevor Project
- The Jed Foundation
Primary care is the backbone of the health care system. So the question is, how do you keep the primary care system itself healthy? That’s the timely topic of this Healthy Conversations episode, where Sree Chaguturu, MD, Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer for CVS Health, addresses the challenges of delivering the right care at the right time, and in the right place. As he puts it, “Almost 80% of individuals in America say that they're unsatisfied with their current health care experience. The average wait time to see a primary care physician is almost one month. But when you do have primary care, great things happen.”
While primary care has been largely under-invested in over the last few decades, Dr. Chaguturu notes that the development of an omnichannel health care approach – in person, in clinic, virtually, or at home – is helping amplify accessibility. He also describes how an emphasis on value-based care can benefit both HCPs and consumers. In the end, as he says, “There is not going to be one right answer. We need all of these different models to succeed, to get primary care to a better state than what it is today.”
Learn more
- Primary care services
- Virtual primary care
While the health care industry can be challenging, with complex regulations and long-established bureaucracies, an innovative company called Redesign Health is working to transform it from within. Redesign Health is one of a number of organizations that received fresh funding last fall to boost health care startups from CVS Health Ventures, a unit of CVS Health which focuses on data-driven medicine and digital health investments. And in just the last five years, Redesign’s New York-based team of about 300 has helped launch more than 50 tech-enabled health care businesses – providing not only talent and capital, but the scaffolding and support to launch them.
Neil Patel, head of New Ventures at Redesign Health, explains how they’ve already improved patient care and touched the lives of more than 10 million people across health verticals that include treating cancer, tele-audiology, senior care, COVID-19 testing, metabolic health, as well as mental health. As he notes, “There's no shortage of problems to solve in health care, the question is the when and the how, as opposed to if you should do it.” Patel is joined by Andrea Messina, executive director and partner at CVS Health Ventures, who characterizes the investment in Redesign Health as an indirect opportunity to sustain and build new companies. "They take a lot of the most, as we see it, difficult elements of starting a new company out of the equation for perspective founders," Messina says.
Learn more
- CVS Health Ventures
- Redesign Health
How are we doing right now in terms of mental health in the United States? According to Dr. Taft Parsons III, the Chief Psychiatric Officer at CVS Health, the situation is alarming: “Before COVID, we already knew that there was more need for mental health services than there were clinicians. And so we have seen an increased demand across all age groups, across all demographics taking place over the last couple years.” In a recent CVS Health Trends report, 39% of providers admitted to having a high level of concern about the mental health of their patients over 65. At the other end of the age spectrum, three in five teen girls felt persistently sad or hopeless in the latest research from the CDC.
On this episode, Dr. Parsons talks about the importance of identifying people who are at risk for social isolation and providing greater access to care. As he says, one silver lining from the pandemic is that “There was kind of this acceptance of people talking about their emotional needs. If you ignore it, if you cover it up, you suffer all sorts of other health effects.”
Learn more
- Health Trends Report: The Future of Healthy Aging
- Mental health services from CVS Health
Genomics may seem like a field of study with minimal impact on our daily lives. But not for much longer — and certainly not to Dr. Deepak Srivastava, a cardiologist and president of the Gladstone Institutes. Rapid technological advances in this field are starting to surface across health care with significant and promising benefits. “The new world,” says Dr. Srivastava, “is going to be one where, as we identify the known genetic causes, we no longer have to accept that that mutation exists. We finally in medicine have the opportunity to think about curing disease.”
The nonprofit Gladstone Institutes focuses on four key disease areas – the heart, brain (including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s), viral (like HIV and Covid), as well as immunologic disorders. On this episode of Healthy Conversations, Dr. Srivastava tells about advances like reprogramming support cells in the pancreas into new insulin-producing cells for diabetes: “So we can take skin or blood cells from any adult and turn those into cells that behave just like a human embryonic stem cell, which has the property that it can become once again any of our over 200 different cell types in the body.” The future may indeed be here, sooner than you think.
Learn more
https://gladstone.org/
Dr. Seth Feuerstein, the CEO of Oui Therapeutics, dispels misconceptions about suicide in the first of a 2-part episode of Healthy Conversations.
Where do things stand now in terms of COVID, Long – and even Medium COVID? What have we learned after the past three years, and what should we, going forward? On the latest Healthy Conversations episode, Dr. Kirsten Anderson, senior medical director for New England for Aetna and CVS Health, shares insights with Daniel, and tells why she feels the role of public health is more important than ever before now.
Listening to Brad Bostic, founder, chairman, and CEO of HC1 -- and Daniel’s latest guest -- you can’t help but be excited about the future: “We've got this incredible opportunity that's once in multiple generations to advance the ball, and it's because you've got access to medical information that's digital unlike you've ever had, and you've got this access to compute, and you have a collection of really intelligent, committed people working on these different areas of innovation. You put all those things together and there could not be a better time to accelerate in healthcare.” He explains how the use of digital twins, and being able to be predictive sooner, can help.
Listening to Brad Bostic, founder, chairman, and CEO of HC1 -- and Daniel’s latest guest -- you can’t help but be excited about the future: “We've got this incredible opportunity that's once in multiple generations to advance the ball, and it's because you've got access to medical information that's digital unlike you've ever had, and you've got this access to compute, and you have a collection of really intelligent, committed people working on these different areas of innovation. You put all those things together and there could not be a better time to accelerate in healthcare.” He explains how the use of digital twins, and being able to be predictive sooner, can help.
This episode features Dr. James Allen, the founder and CEO of Health Systems Thinkers. Dr. Allen went from being a small-town physician in upstate New York, to working for a company in Borneo and later Bangladesh. In the process, he became one of the foremost authorities on community medicine. Being in a remote small town made him see the workplace as part of the community.
In this episode, first released in the fall of 2021, Daniel sits down with Dr. Patrick Hines, the founder and CEO at Functional Fluidics and the leading Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) researcher at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he set up a transformational study on defining the health of red blood cells. Dr. Hines also introduces us to exciting new therapies — recently approved — and the importance of being proactive with SCD.
Tim Blake, the founder and managing director of Semantic Consulting, helps organizations grapple with digital change and digital disruption. And he talks with Daniel about the challenges and potential of digital healthcare – as well as what he learned as the chief information officer of the Tasmanian Health System, such as, “Sometimes problems can be far simpler than we think they are when you ask the communities that really genuinely own those problems.”
Dr. James Stoller is the Chairman of the Education Institute at Cleveland Clinic, a pulmonary critical care physician, and author of Exception to the Rule. Daniel and James sat down to discuss deficit-based thinking, medicine being a team sport, and the simple fact that "doctors, like everyone else that join organizations, expect to grow over the course of their career."
In clinical settings, we often suppress our emotions, ignoring what is now considered a valuable professional dataset – yet harnessing the power of our emotional life helps improve so many aspects of our work from job satisfaction to patient outcomes. It’s only a matter of time until the industry pivots away from this seemingly learned habit. Dr. Marc Brackett, Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and author of 'Permission to Feel,' explains how to tap into the crucial ability to use our emotions wisely. And the very real price we pay when we don’t.
Dr. James Beck, Chief Scientific Officer at the Parkinson’s Foundation, talks with Daniel about the role genetics can play with Parkinson’s, a progressive neurologic disorder with no known cause, and which affects nearly one million people in America.
As Daniel Shaw, VP, Consumer Innovation Products at CVS Health tells us, "At the end of the day it's how you use this data. How are you looking at this data? In what ways are you interpreting it? And then ultimately getting to a place where you can make actual decisions on it.” He also explains how the voice-activated Symphony ecosystem and the Attain app can help encourage both proactive and preventative behaviors.
Yonatan Adiri is out to revolutionize kidney care – and he’s already doing it. The founder and CEO of Healthy.io explains to Daniel how he’s been able to drive 53% compliance in urine testing among those patients previously noncompliant, across age groups – “The last cohort we did in the UK was 80% of which was above the age of 50. 25% between 71 and 80 years old, where we saw 40% compliance.” Key to his success is developing technology that’s clinical grade, affordable, and computer-vision-based.
According to Dr. Bruce Culleton, Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, Kidney Care at CVS Health, 93% of Americans who have kidney disease don't know they have it. And he tells Daniel some of the ways physicians and nurses can address this health literacy issue. Dr. Culleton also explains some of the health equity and disparity challenges that exist in this space. For instance, African Americans are three-to-four times more likely to develop kidney failure than white Americans.
Daniel sat down with Bob Wachter to talk about the power of Twitter in public health, the continued evolution of patient-centered digital transformation, the very necessary adjustments to clinical education, his personal history as the founder of the hospitalist movement, and which technologies continue to lag in our industry.
Dr. Joanne Armstrong, Vice President and Chief Medical Officer for women's health and genomics at CVS Health, talks with Daniel about the incredible impact genes can play in women’s lives, helping to shape prognosis and clinical decisions, in addition to improvements in prenatal screening. Dr. Armstrong also gives us a preview of Aetna’s new guided genetic health services — now expanding into enhanced maternity and transform oncology programs.
Daniel explores the exciting world of genetic health with Dr. Robert Nussbaum, Chief Medical Officer at Invitae. Dr. Nussbaum dispels myths about interpreting genetic data, draws important distinctions around clinical-grade testing, and describes the many important ways genetic information can be used for reproductive planning, screening, and managing disorders.
The past few years may have been challenging but they’ve also brought about transformation in the pharmacy setting. Daniel speaks with Dr. Dan Knecht, the chief clinical innovation officer at CVS Caremark, about ways he’s working to provide more integrative, individualized care for patients with conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension — as well as behavioral health.
While 2021 has been a rollercoaster year, Daniel was able to cover plenty of exciting and innovative topics. He sat down with experts in public health data (discovering the data supply chain), precision oncology care, functional medicine, cutting edge red blood cell research, a venture capitalist, a former CEO and more. Health care and health care innovation is going to continue to accelerate in 2022 as the industry evolves from “intermittent, reactive sick care to a future that's continuous, proactive, anytime, anywhere, bringing us better outcomes at lower costs and bringing better health equity all around the planet.”
Daniel speaks with award-winning filmmaker Matthew Heineman, who had exclusive access in March 2020 to one of New York’s largest and hardest-hit medical centers for his powerful documentary, The First Wave — as well as Dr. Nathalie Dougé, internist & hospitalist — about the toll COVID has taken on health care workers. The film is in theaters now and available on Hulu.
Daniel sits down with Dr. Patrick Hines, the founder and CEO at Functional Fluidics and the leading Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) researcher at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he set up a transformational study on defining the health of red blood cells — membrane stability, abnormalities, stickiness, and more. Dr. Hines also introduces us to exciting new therapies — recently approved — and the importance of being proactive with SCD.
Some 100,000 individuals in America alone are dealing with sickle cell. Daniel speaks with Joel Helle, Vice President of Physician Services for CVS Health, about how to change the often one-size-fits-all approach to this painful disease — to care that is not only more continuous, but personalized, and proactive.
Dr. Nitin Gupta is the founder of Rivertowns Pediatrics, a very different type of private practice. Having practiced from Newark, NJ to Caribou, ME, he’s landed on a value-based, concierge model that works. Boiling things down, Dr. Gupta told Daniel, “You're spending more time on that computer than you are face to face with that patient. This gives you the opportunity to be the doctor that you were meant to be, and so that's why I started this.”
Daniel sits down with Dr. Kim Blackwell, former oncologist and Eli Lilly trialist who is now the Chief Medical Officer at Tempus, a technology company that has built the world's largest library of clinical and molecular data as well as an operating system to make that information accessible and useful for patients, physicians, and researchers. They discuss big data, genetic sequencing, and the tech that drives today’s transformative precision cancer treatments.
Daniel sits down with Dr. Pat Basu, President & CEO of Cancer Treatment Centers of America, to discuss his unique point of view on the evolution of oncology care, precision medicine, the changing role of MD MBAs like himself, his early telemedicine work with Doctor On Demand, as well as his time as a Fellow advising the White House.
Daniel sits down with Dr. Mark Hyman, Head of Strategy & Innovation at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine – “a paradigm shift in our thinking about disease.” Dr. Hyman says, “We've now got 155,000 diseases in our diagnostic category book, but they're really all driven by a smaller number of common root causes.”
Daniel sits down with Dr. Robert Pearl, former surgeon and CEO at Permanente Medical Group for 18 years, about the culture of medicine and his new book Uncaring: How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors & Patients (proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders). Dr. Pearl provides an unflinching diagnosis of “physician culture” dating back to Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis’ battered leather apron in 1844; second, he details the escalating costs of healthcare; and third, he addresses the danger of implicit bias in healthcare with some truly stunning examples that can only come through the lens a former physician turned health care executive.
Daniel is a physician who wears many hats: inventor, founder, investor, and startup advisor. This week he sat down with another physician, Dr. Vineeta Agarwala, who has taken her clinical expertise to a whole other industry. Vineeta is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she leads investments for the storied firm’s bio fund (overseeing therapeutics, diagnostics, and digital health).
Daniel sat down with Dr. Dylan George, a biosecurity and data expert from Gingko Bioworks. Dylan’s career spans academia and a number of roles in the federal government — advising the Obama administration on Ebola and, more recently, advising the Biden-Harris transition team on COVID-19. If data is the new oil, it's also the new way of protecting our kids, our families, and our communities.
May is Women’s Health month, and Daniel sat down with Dr. Joanne Armstrong, Chief Medical Officer for Women's Health & Genomics at CVS Health, for both a tactical and macro-level look at how we all measure up to the rest of the world in this area — including prenatal, maternal, and postpartum care, as well as breast cancer and the latest studies on unconscious bias.
Daniel speaks with Dr. Laurie Zephyrin, VP of Health Systems Equity at the Commonwealth Fund. Laurie was a key player in transforming women’s health at the VA, having trained as an OB-GYN before scaling her attention to systems, structures and culture.
Daniel speaks with Dr. Sree Chaguturu, Chief Medical Officer, CVS Caremark about vaccine hesitancy — citing original research around common objections and physician best practices — as well as current vaccination rates, variants and boosters, and what we’ve learned as an enterprise from long term care (LTC) facilities and the federal retail pharmacy program.
In this episode, we explore the latest thinking and newest innovations in at-home care for seniors. Guests include AgeWave founders,Doctors Ken and Maddy Dychtwald, our own Adam Pellegrini (SVP Enterprise Virtual Care & Consumer Health), and health care futurist Zayna Khayat (author of The Future of Aging).
We also connected with Dr. Kenneth Snow about innovative technologies like CGM (continuous glucose monitors), early detection, and the fine line between giving patients more autonomy and the risk of overwhelming them. Lastly, we’ll hear from Rebecca Rice, pharmacist and educator, about the evolving role she plays in the life of chronic care patients via the unique HealthHub model.
There might not be a specific moment when we can hit the reset button and start to tackle systemic healthcare challenges with a clean slate, but smaller resets are already underway. Join us as we examine what a COVID-19 Reset looks like for doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals.
In this episode, we spoke with Dr. Rushika Fernandopulle, founder and CEO of Iora Health, about how physicians have addressed the pandemic in their own practices and the changing perceptions around value based care. We also spoke to Dr. Dan Knecht and Angie Meoli, for insight into how CVS is changing its own systems.
One of the most eye-opening impacts of COVID-19 has been the dramatic disparities highlighted in our healthcare system. Dr. Dela Taghipour and Dr. Nadia Abuelezam will discuss how we can collectively reimagine community healthcare to address those disparities.
In the second episode of Healthy Conversations — an open discussion among healthcare professionals about innovation, what we're learning on the front lines of this pandemic, and how our industry is changing in real time — we turn our attention to Recovery. Data is critical in addressing the challenges of COVID-19 and influences so many of our daily, clinical decisions. How will big data, more specifically “distilling multiple biometric data streams,” transform medicine moving forward?
Join our hosts, Doctors Dela Taghipour and Daniel Kraft, in conversation with Dr. Eric Topol (Scripps Research Translational Institute), Dr. Caroline Buckee (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), Adam Pellegrini, and Firdaus Bhathena (CVS Health).
In the first of three COVID-19-focused episodes, listen in on robust discussions with CVS Health leaders and Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as they discuss the importance of testing, as well as how systemic racism is impacting the pandemic response.