2025 Summer Roundtable Series

The ASTARISQ Summer Roundtable Series is back! Join us for our AHRQ-funded roundtable series to highlight changemakers to improve safety, quality, and trustworthiness in health delivery systems (HDS).

We aim to build a community of practice as part of the ASTARISQ initiative. By sharing lessons learned and promising practices to address and improve patient safety, healthcare delivery, and advancing whole-person care, we embrace opportunities for continued learning, implementation, and advancement across health systems. Throughout the 2025 roundtable series, our members will discuss evidence-based practices at the individual and organizational levels and facilitate opportunities to practice the use of various tools in diverse contexts. Together, we will make health delivery systems safer, patient-centered, and higher quality.

2025 ASTARISQ Roundtable Series Information and Registration

Register here to attend one or more of the following webinars.

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Trust and Trustworthiness in Health Care and Science

Wednesday, July 16, 2025, 1-2 p.m. ET

How can we ensure that everyone is empowered to make informed and personally appropriate health decisions for themselves, their families, and their communities based on accurate, understandable, and evidence-based information? In this year’s ASTARISQ kick-off, our roundtable members will discuss how they have led the fight to build trust across policy and practice and how we can navigate the current landscape.

Panelists:

Sarah Greene, MPH (she/her) is a Consultant and Senior Advisor to the National Academy of Medicine. With a 25-year career in health care research, strategy, and consultation, she combines scientific and methodological expertise with a patient-centered orientation to support the realization of a true national learning health system. Ms. Greene was the first-ever Executive Director of the Health Care Systems Research Network, a consortium of 19 research centers that are based in health care delivery systems including Geisinger, HealthPartners, Kaiser Permanente, Harvard Pilgrim, and many others.

Erin O’Malley (she/her) is the Executive Director of the Coalition for Trust in Health & Science (CTHS), a nonpartisan, non-profit organization focused on ensuring that everyone is empowered to make informed and personally appropriate health decisions for themselves, their families, and their communities based on accurate, understandable, and evidence-based information. Prior to joining CTHS, O’Malley served as senior director of policy at America’s Essential Hospitals. She oversaw all federal public policy initiatives to protect essential hospitals’ interests and support their mission to provide equitable care to all.

Kelsey Sala-Hamrick, PhD, LP (she/her) is a Senior Research Scientist at MPHI’s Center for Strategic Health Partnerships (CSHP) and a licensed clinical psychologist. Dr. Sala-Hamrick's work focuses on promoting resilience in youth and families exposed to trauma and adverse childhood experiences. promoting health equity and increasing access to care through developing, implementing and evaluating evidence-based, trauma-informed programs and services and by strengthening ties between community members, researchers, providers, and policy makers for meaningful change.

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Improving Health Care Delivery

Wednesday, July 23, 2025, 1-2 p.m.

Research to improve healthcare delivery requires people and community engagement, tools and training to enable healthcare professionals to deliver whole-person care, and increase the use of evidence in healthcare policy, coverage, and clinical practice. In this roundtable, our speakers will share their experiences and promising practices in engaging people and communities in care, including strategies to engage and empower patients and caregivers in direct care and care coordination.

Panelists:

Vu-An Foster, MPH (she/her) is the founder and executive director of Life After 2 Losses, a nonprofit organization that prevents reproductive and health injustices. After suffering two preventable second trimester pregnancy losses and nearly dying from severe postpartum preeclampsia, she implemented educational programs and advocacy initiatives to support women, families, and communities coping with pregnancy loss, while simultaneously empowering them to prevent it. She has served on multiple committees and advisory boards surrounding perinatal health and infant mortality, including the New Jersey Maternal Care Quality Collaborative (NJMCQC) with the New Jersey Department of Health, where she serves as the Vice-Chairperson.

Theresa Green, PhD, MBA (she/her) is the Director of Community Health Education and Policy at the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Center for Community Health & Prevention (CCHP). Dr. Green also leads the Community Health Improvement Planning process and implementation for Monroe County and Chairs the Hospital Association of New York (HANY’s) Community Health Task Force for community benefits. She currently serves as the President of the Board of Health for Monroe County.

Lillian Mehran, PhD, MPH, CHES (she/her) is the founder of Reframe Health and has more than 15 years of experience in community health and advocacy. As a community health educator, her work focuses on improving health literacy, promoting health equity, and creating programs and resources. Her work has served diverse populations including LGBTQIA+ patients, caregivers, individuals with chronic health conditions, intimate partner violence survivors, and older adults in underserved communities.

Betty Roggenkamp, MSHC (she/her) is an adolescents and young adults (AYA) Program Development Strategist at Teen Cancer America, focusing on establishing integrated care programs for AYAs diagnosed with cancer. Betty possesses extensive experience in cancer care improvement and community advocacy: she holds positions as an Executive Board Member for the Cactus Cancer Society and a Committee Member for AYAs Take Chicago, and leads projects within the Coleman Supportive Oncology Collaborative for AYAs and the Coleman Supportive Oncology Collaborative for Adults.

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Improving Patient Safety in Health Delivery Systems

Wednesday, July 30, 2025, 1-2 p.m. ET

Patient safety is a vast landscape: patient safety is the freedom from accidental or preventable injury produced by health care and the practices that create a safe care environment. There is a wide range of patient safety risks in specific healthcare settings: acute, hospital, labor and delivery units, long-term, ambulatory, and others. In this session, our roundtable will share how they have bridged the gap between research and the delivery of safer patient care, and what models have led to successful implementation for improving and ensuring patient safety for all.

Panelists:

Nakeitra L. Burse, DrPH, CHES (she/her) is the Founder and Executive Director of Six Dimensions, a woman- and minority-led nonprofit focused on improving Black maternal health outcomes. We are committed to health equity and social justice as we work to improve maternal health outcomes. Dr. Burse is dedicated to understanding the impact of systems on the health of communities. Her work is centered around health equity and social justice issues and improving maternal health outcomes for Black women. She has been a vocal advocate for policies in Mississippi to improve health outcomes. Dr. Burse has experience in a variety of sectors including nonprofit, private, academia and government.

Lou Hart, MD (he/him) is a practicing Pediatric Hospitalist, an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine, and the Medical Director of Health Equity for Yale New Haven Health. Dr. Hart started his clinical leadership career as Director of Equity, Quality & Safety at NYC Health + Hospitals, our nation's largest comprehensive safety-net healthcare system. By leveraging quality improvement and patient safety frameworks and methodologies, he confronts systems-based drivers of inequity through a just culture approach. 

Lucy Schulson, MD (she/her) is a board-certified internal medicine physician at Boston Medical Center (BMC) and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. Dr. Schulson practices primary care at BMC’s Immigrant and Refugee Health Center. Her research is focused on how health systems can be improved to address gaps in quality of care and patient safety to improve equity.

Angela D. Thomas, DrPH, MPH, MBA (she/her) is the Vice President of Healthcare Delivery Research at MedStar Health Research Institute (MHRI). Dr. Thomas is responsible for leading a team of experts to apply rigorous scientific methods to enable next-generation healthcare delivery through quality, safety, innovation, health economics, payment reform, outcomes, health services research, data science, and health equity. She also brings nearly 20 years of experience in the scientific and administrative leadership of translational and clinical research from Federal and non-Federal sponsors.

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Accessibility and Affordability: Policy and Practice

Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2025, 1-2 p.m. ET

While over 90% of the United States population has some form of health insurance, medical debt remains a problem to both access and afford health care. In this session, our roundtable will share resources to reduce the burden of medical debt, and promising policies and practices to decrease the financial barriers to accessing and affording quality health care across the United States.

Panelists:

Berneta L. Haynes (she/her) is a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) focusing on consumer energy policy and medical debt. At NCLC, she has written: Protecting Older Adults from Surprise Medical Bills; Tariff-based On-Bill Financing: Assessing the Risks for Low-Income Consumers; The Racial Health and Wealth Gap: Impact of Medical Debt on Black Families; Community Solar: Expanding Access and Safeguarding Low-Income Families; and Air-Source Heat Pumps: Protecting the Financial Well-being of Low-Income Families While Addressing Climate Change. She is also a contributing author to NCLC’s Access to Utility Service treatise and the medical debt chapter of NCLC’s Collection Actions treatise. She received the Health Equity Advocate of the Year Award from Families USA in 2025. 

Nasrien E. Ibrahim, MD, MPH (she/her) is an advanced heart failure and transplant cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is the founder and executive director of the nonprofit, The Equity in Heart Transplant Project, Inc., a public charity that provides financial assistance to patients with end-stage heart failure who need a transplant. In 2021, Dr. Ibrahim was invited by the White House Office of Public Engagement to participate in a Health Equity Leaders Roundtable Series focused on access to care. 

Jared Walker (he/him) is the Founder of Dollar For, a national nonprofit that makes charity care known, easy, and fair. Dollar For educates patients about charity care, helps patients navigate the application process, and calls out hospitals that don’t follow regulations. Dollar For is entirely funded through philanthropic grants and donations and has helped eliminated over $87 million in medical bills for patients across the United States.

Sam Whitaker (he/him) is the co-founder and CEO of Mural Health, the clinical research industry’s first participant management platform, designed to meet the needs of modern-day participants, help them enroll and remain in a trial, and reduce the administrative burden for sites. He has been at the forefront of "The Harley Jacobsen Clinical Trial Participation Income Exemption Act,” a bill aimed to enhance diversity in clinical trials and provide access to experimental therapies for underprivileged communities in America by ensuring that payments to clinical trial participants are exempt from gross income

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Health Literacy and Credible Messengers

Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2025, 1-2 p.m.

Health literacy emphasizes people’s ability to use health information, rather than only understand it. It is increasingly difficult for people to separate evidence-based information, especially online, from misleading content. Everyone, no matter how educated or experienced, is at risk of misunderstanding health information. Organizations have a responsibility to equitably enable individuals to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions. In our final 2025 roundtable session, our experts will share how they navigate the challenges for advancing health literacy and discuss resources to make health delivery systems, and the communities they serve, more health literate.

Panelists:

Sylvia Baedorf Kassis, MPH (she/her) is the Program Director for Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Department of Medicine - Division of Global Health Equity. Sylvia brings over 20 years of experience in ethical/regulatory review of research, clinical trial workforce training and capacity building, and study coordination, management and oversight. Sylvia champions efforts to make clinical research more understandable and accessible to patients, participants, and caregivers through her work on Health Literacy in Clinical Research and the first-of-its-kind, plain language Clinical Research Glossary.

Malini B. DeSilva, MD, MPH (she/her) is a Research Investigator and the Co-Director of the Pregnancy and Child Health Research Center at HealthPartners Institute. She is also an affiliated faculty at the University of Minnesota and a practicing physician for both the HealthPartners Travel & Tropical Medicine Department and the St. Paul-Ramsey County Tuberculosis Clinic. Health disparities issues have been at the center of both her clinical and research interests, particularly focused on non-English speaking populations, refugee and immigrant health, and vaccine preventable diseases.

Stan Hudson (he/him) is the Director of Professional Development at the Institute for Healthcare Advancement. He is a health literacy expert with 30 years of experience in health services research with a focus on health equity. For the last 2 decades, Stan has led the development and implementation of health literacy/equity education programs and curricula for health professionals and communities. For the past 5 years, he has been working on addressing digital health literacy issues, through organizational assessment and training health professionals how to help people find reliable health information online, use telehealth, and access their patient portals.

Deana Williams, PhD, MPH (she/her) is a Research Investigator at MultiCare Institute for Research and Innovation, whose mission is to partner with our communities to improve quality of life and advance medical science through research. Dr. Williams founded the Health Equity Research Program within her institute, with her research primarily focusing on advancing health equity for LGBTQIA+ populations, with an emphasis on the health and wellbeing of racially and ethnically diverse queer and bisexual women.

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Register here to attend one or more of the ASTARISQ 2025 webinars. 

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