The National Press Club Journalism Institute held an instructional session on Feb. 25, 2025, about the types of infrastructure that support collaboration between public health and health care delivery systems; as well as the challenges facing professionals who work in both spaces.
Dr. Rishi Manchanda, founder and CEO of HealthBegins, led this session to help journalists tap into and report on these complex tools and turn niche concepts into dinner-table conversations to help drive the public’s understanding of their health ecosystem.
This program was the first in a six-part webinar series and part of the Institute’s inaugural Public Health Reporting Fellowship, funded by the Common Health Coalition. All webinars in the series are open to the public at no cost.
Resources shared during the webinar include:
- The 10 Essential Public Health Services
- What is HIE?
- “Interoperability” resource page
- Civitas Networks for Health
- Rishi Manchanda’s TED page
About the speaker
Dr. Rishi Manchanda is CEO at HealthBegins. He has advanced bold strategies to help health care move upstream and advance health equity for historically marginalized patients and communities throughout his career as physician, executive, and public health champion. Dr. Manchanda served as the founding director of social medicine for a network of community health centers in South-Central Los Angeles, as the first lead primary care physician for homeless veterans at the Greater Los Angeles VA, and as the inaugural chief medical officer for a self-insured employer with a large rural agricultural workforce.
In his book — The Upstream Doctors — and TED Talk, he introduced “Upstreamists,” a new model of healthcare professionals who improve outcomes by addressing the social and structural drivers of health equity — patients’ social needs, community-level social determinants of health, and structural determinants of health equity including structural racism.
About the Common Health Coalition
The Common Health Coalition: Together for Public Health brings together leading health organizations in pursuit of a reimagined health system: one in which the nation’s health care and public health systems no longer work in parallel, but hand in hand — with better health for all as the common goal.
The Common Health Coalition is hosted by the Institute for Public Health Innovation, a non-profit that builds cross-sector partnerships, promotes health equity, and works to create effective public health systems and policies that foster healthy communities. To sign up for the newsletter or learn more, visit commonhealthcoalition.org and follow on LinkedIn.
About the National Press Club Journalism Institute
The National Press Club Journalism Institute promotes an engaged global citizenry through an independent and free press, and equips journalists with skills and standards to inform the public in ways that inspire a more representative democracy. As the non-profit affiliate of the National Press Club, the Institute powers journalism in the public interest. The Institute depends on grants, foundation funds, and contributions from individuals like you. Your donation today allows the Institute to offer the majority of its programming at no cost.