The SIREN Podcast

The closing plenary discussion at the SIREN 2025 National Research Meeting: Advancing the science of social care, occurred on February 4, 2025 and featured a conversation with health and social care leaders Damon Francis, Monica Soni, Palav Babaria, and Sanjay Basu. Speakers explored multiple social care initiatives being taken to scale and offered their insights about how to navigate this work within a rapidly changing fe...

This plenary session held on February 3, 2025 at the SIREN 2025 National Research Meeting: Advancing the science of social care featured a discussion between moderator Anand Shah, Vice President of Social Health at Kaiser Permanente, and panelists Stuart Butler, Scholar in Residence of Economic Studies at The Brookings Institution, and Len Nichols, professor emeritus of Health Policy at George Mason University. (Note: Dr N...

The opening plenary session on February 3, 2025 at the SIREN 2025 National Research Meeting: Advancing the science of social care, featured keynote speaker Lauren Taylor, an assistant professor in the Department of Population Health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where she is jointly appointed in the Division of Healthcare Delivery Science and the Division of Medical Ethics. In her talk, “Whose job is it, anyway? Expl...

Medicaid community reinvestment requirements enable states to require or incentivize state contractors to reinvest in the communities they serve. State laws, waivers, and contracts that include community reinvestment provisions have specified reinvestments (using percentage of profits and/or performance measures) in community initiatives that align with the state’s key priorities, e.g., improving healthy food access. On J...

SIREN was excited to partner with Futures Without Violence on a two-part webinar series this season. In the second event held on December 5, 2024, speakers shared their lessons learned about sustainable and equitable approaches to documentation/coding and intervention, which are relevant not only to intimate partner violence but also to other social drivers of health. 

This webinar is made possible with support from Blue Sh...

SIREN partnered with Futures Without Violence on a two-part webinar series this season. On November 5th, 2024 speakers discussed evidence-based and healing-centered approaches for responding to intimate partner violence and share strategies shown to enable and sustain meaningful partnerships with community-based programs.

This webinar was made possible through support from the Blue Shield of California Foundation and Kaiser...

Evidence is mounting about the impacts of interventions such as medically tailored meals and produce prescriptions on diet-related health conditions, fueling interest in these interventions among healthcare organizations and payers. On June 5th at 9am PT/12pm ET we heard experts discuss the latest research in this area. Panelists included researchers Drs. Kurt Hager (UMass), Hilary Seligman (UCSF), and Ariana Thompson-Last...

 This is the second of a two-part webinar series on implications of the Camden Coalition’s RCT results. 

In 2020, a major article on “healthcare hotspotting” may have caught your eye. The article described findings from our four-year, prospective, 800-person randomized evaluation of the Camden Core Model, an innovative and comprehensive approach to care coordination for patients with very high use of healthcare services. Th...

This is the first of a two-part webinar series on implications of the Camden Coalition’s RCT results. 

In 2020, a major article on “healthcare hotspotting” may have caught your eye. It did ours! The article described findings from a four-year, prospective, 800-person randomized evaluation of the Camden Coalition’s Camden Core Model, an innovative and comprehensive approach to care coordination for patients with very high u...

On March 29, 2024, the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics convened a session of the Organizational Ethics Consortia Series on social care. Addressing health inequity generally requires attention to the most marginalized patients, whose health is often undermined by social, legal and financial challenges. In response, many health care delivery organizations have begun to collect data about health-related social nee...

On Monday March 11th participants joined us for a conversation about the new SIREN Social Care Conceptual Model! Emerging evidence suggests that social care programs do not affect health solely by connecting patients with social services and reducing socioeconomic barriers. In a recent paperwe used this evidence to develop a model that depicts the multiple pathways through which social care interventions appear to operate....

Although there is no question that adverse social circumstances negatively impact health and healthcare outcomes, it is not clear what the healthcare sector’s role should be in addressing these adverse social factors. On February 28, 2024, SIREN Co-Director Caroline Fichtenberg moderated a lively discussion with three thought-leaders on their perspectives on this important question: 

• Seth Berkowitz, MD, MPH, Associate P...

Social care practice and research are often inspired by intentions to advance health equity. However, social care is often planned and executed without a clear recognition of and confrontation with the racism, particularly anti-Black racism, that has led to existing inequities. While the legally-sanctioned enslavement of Black people in the United States was abolished in 1865, many of its aims have been perpetuated through...

Health research remains ensconced in a heavily positivist, reductionist, settler-colonial, racial-capitalist “ritual” of knowledge extractivism and expropriation wherein credentialed researchers mine marginalized communities for data to (re)package and (re)distribute as their (our) own knowledge. Much of this work has focused on racial health inequities while, curiously, leaving unexamined matters of positionality, epistem...

Each year an increasing number of original research articles are published about healthcare-based social care programs and policies. However, relatively few of these studies measure the impact of social care interventions on different racial or ethnic minority groups. More information about differential impacts could help to improve the implementation – and ideally the impacts – of social care. During the SIREN 2022 Nation...

The final panel at the SIREN 2022 National Research Meeting: Racial Health Equity in Social Care featured four Experts by Experience (Lisa Hamlett, Mike McNear, Ann Reynoso, and Stephanie Walker) as they reflected on their takeaways from the meeting, expressed what was most important to them, and pointed out opportunities for more research and action. The goal of this session was for participants to leave the SIREN Nationa...

In this episode, Sarah Coombs, the director for health system transformation at the National Partnership for Women & Families, and Janice Tufte, an active patient partner in research, evidence generation, measurement, and care improvement, discuss their reactions to the patient and patient caregiver perspectives section of the State of the Science on Social Screening in Healthcare Settings.

 
To read the SIREN social...

In this episode, we are joined by Cherelle Vanbrakle, MEd, the Director of Health Promotion and Community Advocacy at People’s Community Clinic based in Austin, TX, and Andrea Nederveld, MD, MPH, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado, to discuss the state of the science about the implementation of social screening in healthcare settings.

To read the SIREN social screening...

In this episode, we are joined by Jaedon Avey, Health Program Analyst, and L’aakaw Eesh Kyle Wark, Researcher, both of whom are from the Southcentral Foundation in Anchorage Alaska, a non-profit, tribally owned and operated healthcare organization serving 65,000 Alaska Native/American Indian peoples in urban and rural communities across over 100,000 square miles of Southcentral Alaska. Emilia De Marchis talks with Jaedon a...