There’s a Better Way: Smart Talk on Healthcare and Technology

This episode features Didi Davis , Vice President of Informatics, Conformance & Interoperability at The Sequoia Project. Davis has over three decades of experience in the healthcare industry and is nationally known as a subject matter expert in healthcare standards and interoperability design and strategy.   Davis describes the arc of her career as a “journey in serendipity,” when th...

This episode features Dr. Brett Giroir, CEO of Altesa BioSciences, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical firm working to develop new medications for viral respiratory infections with a focus on vulnerable populations. And Dr. Giroir knows plenty about infections, having served as the COVID-19 “testing tsar” on the White House Coronavirus Task Force.  In this episode, Dr. Giroir describes how his...

Innovative, Compassionate, Future-Focused. Those three words characterize Rina Shah and what she wants for her patients, for the care Walgreens delivers, and for the industry at large.  In this episode, we talk with Shah, who is Walgreens Group Vice President of Pharmacy of the Future and Segment Strategy, about just how she envisions the FUTURE of PHARMACY. The topic couldn’t be more of the...

Healthcare interoperability has been a buzzword for years. After decades of incremental progress, the industry is making traction. Information is being exchanged—and in massive quantities; clinicians and healthcare leaders are now pushing for it to be consumable. Meanwhile, we’re still not far along in interoperable systems to allow for national information exchange. American healthcare is messy,...

Welcome to the second season of There's a Better Way: Smart Talk on Healthcare and Technology , an award-winning podcast series from Surescripts . In each episode, host Melanie Marcus , Chief Marketing Officer of Surescripts, sits down with some of the most inspiring leaders in healthcare today for in-depth and personal conversations about the industry’s challenges and opportunities. B y the end o...

As President of Kroger Health, Colleen Lindholz leads a team of 23,000 healthcare professionals in nearly 2500 pharmacies in 37 states who care for more than 14 million patients annually. In this episode, Colleen shares passion for wellness and nutrition, and health and how Kroger is working to deliver whole patient care. Melissa and Colleen also discuss how the pandemic laid bare existing inequit...

In this episode, Melanie sits down with Lee Barrett, Executive Director and CEO of EHNAC, a national healthcare accreditation organization. Previously, he was the President and CEO and sat on the board of directors at HealthEC, a consulting and solutions provider of products for ACOs, Population Health, HIEs, web portals, EMR and transactional platforming. As a health IT and security guru, Lee has...

In this episode, Melanie sits down with community pharmacist Michele Belcher. Michele is president of the National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA) and the owner of Grants Pass Pharmacy, which dates to 1904 and is the last independent pharmacy in Grants Pass, Oregon. Elected president of NCPA in 2022, Michele has long been active in state and federal legislation impacting community pharmac...

In this episode, Melanie sits down with Dr. Nele Jessel, the Chief Medical Officer of athenahealth. With two medical licenses—one to practice in Germany and one to practice in the U.S.—Dr. Jessel is a board-certified clinical informaticist and pediatrician with a passion for improving healthcare delivery and patient outcomes through technology. A self-described EHR cheerleader, she first became in...

As other guests have shared, there’s often a strong link between a parent’s professional world and the career their child chooses. In other words: “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” In this episode, Melanie sits down with someone who understands this connection firsthand: Sam Lambson, the Vice President of Interoperability at Oracle Cerner . While Sam was growing up, his father worked in...

As the U.S. population ages, it’s also getting sicker: According to the CDC, more than a quarter of U.S. adults  face multiple chronic conditions. An ever-increasing number of Americans are on a specialty therapy or medication—more than 66 million in 2022. The good news? Conditions that were untreatable decades ago now have effective therapies. The bad news? The journey from diagnosis to...

In this episode, Melanie sits down with Tina Grande, the Executive Vice President for Policy at the Healthcare Leadership Council. In her role, Tina helps to advocate for consumer-centered healthcare reform, emphasizing the value of private-sector innovation as well as public-private partnership. Tina has healthcare and policy in her blood: her father represented the Mayo Clinic on Capitol Hill, a...

In this episode, Melanie sits down with Mariann Yeager, the Chief Executive Officer of The Sequoia Project, an independent advocate for nationwide health information exchange. Beginning her career in health IT in Nashville, Mariann eventually made her way to Washington, D.C., where she’s remained on the forefront of the digital healthcare transformation ever since. Melanie and Mariann discuss how...

TIME recently named Walgreens one of the 100 Most Influential Companies of 2022, noting that as of March 2022, the company had administered 60 million COVID-19 vaccines and 26 million tests. In this episode, host Melanie Marcus, Chief Marketing Officer of Surescripts, sits down with a guest who has had a truly noteworthy career, beginning as a cashier at the Walgreens across the street from her hi...

Welcome to " There's a Better Way: Smart Talk on Healthcare & Technology", a new podcast series by Surescripts. In each episode, host Melanie Marcus, Chief Marketing Officer of Surescripts, sits down with some of the most inspiring leaders in healthcare today for in-depth and personal conversations about the industry’s challenges and opportunities. Through this podcast, you’ll be exposed to ne...