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Expert Coronavirus Updates with Susan Dentzer | Session 32
Episode 10717th December 2020 • Passionate Pioneers with Mike Biselli • Mike Biselli
00:00:00 00:34:11

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This episode’s Community Champion Sponsor is Ensemble Health Partners. To learn more about their inspiring work: CLICK HERE

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For months, all of us have been personally or professionally battling COVID-19, or both. 

This global public health crisis has inflicted terrible physical, mental, emotional, financial, and spiritual strain on billions of people around the world.  

Yet, during these challenging times, another crippling disease has taken root across our nation- we are now facing an infodemic that is, unfortunately, impacting some of our friends, colleagues, and loved ones. 

To confront the issue of disinformation during this pandemic, I asked Susan Dentzer to join us to shed light on this critically important issue. 

For ten years, Susan was the former on-air Health Correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. Additionally, she was the editor-in-chief of the policy journal Health Affairs and is currently a Senior Policy Fellow for the Robert J. Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke University. 

I’m grateful to have Susan on our podcast to confront the infodemic scourge plaguing many of our communities and the opportunity to learn from her how we can work together to move the health of the nation forward. Work that must be based on facts and science. Let’s go! 

Episode Highlights:

  • Susan’s storied career, including PBS NewsHour On-Air Health Correspondent
  • Uncertainty of facts during the pandemic
  • Politics and COVID-19
  • Impact of misinformation to our society, nation, and the world
  • Susan’s current work with the Robert J Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke University

About our Guest: 

Susan Dentzer is Senior Policy Fellow for the Robert J. Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke University.  Based in Washington, DC, where the center’s research team is located, she focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic response; health system transformation, such as through telehealth; biopharmaceutical policy; health care issues in the 2020 elections,  and other key health policy issues.  

Dentzer is one of the nation's most respected health and health policy thought leaders and a frequent speaker and commentator on television and radio, including PBS and NPR, and an author of commentaries and analyses in print publications such as Modern Healthcare.  She was also the editor and lead author of the book Health Care Without Walls: A Roadmap for Reinventing U.S. Health Care, available on Amazon.com.

From March 2016 to February 2018, Dentzer was President and Chief Executive Officer of NEHI, the Network for Excellence in Health Innovation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization then composed of more than 80 stakeholder organizations from across all key sectors of health and health care.  From 2013 to 2016, she was a senior policy adviser to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s largest philanthropy focused on health and health care in the United States, and before that, was the editor-in-chief of the policy journal Health Affairs. From 1998 to 2008, she was the on-air Health Correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. Dentzer wrote and hosted the 2015 PBS documentary, Reinventing American Healthcare, focusing on the innovations pioneered by the Geisinger Health System and spread to health systems across the nation. 

Dentzer is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) and also serves on the Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice of the National Academies of Science, Medicine, and Engineering. She is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations; a fellow of the National Academy of Social Insurance; and a fellow of the Hastings Center, a nonpartisan bioethics research institute. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Rescue Committee, a leading global humanitarian organization; a member of the board of directors of Research! America, which advocates on behalf of biomedical and health-related research; and a member of the board of directors of the Public Health Institute, a nonprofit organization addressing public health issues and solutions nationwide. Dentzer serves on the global access public policy advisory committee for Roche, the international biopharmaceutical company based in Basel, Switzerland. She is a member of the Boards of Advisors for RAND Health and for the Philip R. Lee Institute of Health Policy Studies at the University of California-San Francisco.  From 2011 to 2017 she was a public member of the Board of Directors of the American Board of Medical Specialties, which assists 24 medical specialty boards in the ongoing evaluation and certification of physicians. 

Dentzer graduated from Dartmouth, is a trustee emerita of the college, and chaired the Dartmouth Board of Trustees from 2001 to 2004. She serves on the advisory board for the Center for Global Health Equity at Dartmouth, and previously was a member of the Board of Advisors of Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine for more than two decades.   Dentzer holds an honorary master’s degree from Dartmouth and an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Muskingum University.   She and her husband have three adult children. 

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