Welcome, I'm Professor Paula Lantz and today I'm delighted to be having a conversation with Dr. Joneigh Khaldun. Who actually is one of my idols in public health and public service. Grateful you're here with us today. Dr. Khaldun is a Practicing Emergency Physician, and she is also currently the Vice President and Chief Health Equity Officer for CVS Health. Dr. Khaldun has had a number of different important roles in public health administration and leadership and to get us started, Dr. Khaldun, and again thank you so much for being with us today. Can you please tell us about some of the cool positions you've had? Absolutely, is just an honor to be here today well, I've known you for many years including earlier on in my career so it's just lovely to be back here with you. Thank you. Yes, I've been honored to have several roles in administration particularly in the government sector. I was actually the Chief Medical Officer in the Baltimore City Health Department. We had seven clinics, a freestanding lab, so I was able to oversee that work there. I also have served as the Medical Director and the Director of the Detroit Health Department, so building out programs there and a lot of restructuring and responding to Hepatitis A crisis. One after another. Then more recently before my current role I was the Chief Medical Executive for the State of Michigan, but also the Chief Deputy Director for Health in the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. Public-health, Medicaid, behavioral health and our state mental health hospitals were under my umbrella. These are big jobs I'm sure everybody realizes that. Can you summarize some of the major administrative responsibilities that you had when you worked for the city of Baltimore and the city of Detroit, and the State of Michigan? Absolutely. In government public service it's all about the people. It's all about the people and how you're serving people. Using your small budget, in government it's often a small budget. How you're using your dollars and being stewards of those dollars to advance in my role health for the people of that community, Baltimore, Detroit, or the State of Michigan. A lot of my work was on planning. A lot of it was about quality, looking at data. How are we in our Baltimore clinics, how are we serving people? What are our metrics? How are we thinking about building? Was something else that I worked on in Baltimore and Detroit specifically as far as our infrastructure, staffing, so a lot of planning, assessment, looking at data quality improvement work. That's great, and those are all the core functions of public administration that we've been talking about in this specialization. Also as you know, the learners in this specialization are really interested in what's the role of data and data analytics in the public sector, so could you talk a bit about the importance of information and data for meeting your very large administrative responsibilities. Absolutely, data are so important. You don't know how well you're serving or quite frankly if you're serving people at all unless you have data. Data are very important when it comes to understanding the people that you're serving different quality metrics, so how many people are getting access to care? Getting the treatment they are supposed to be getting? What's the timing of them getting that treatment? Especially in government or public health we look at death and death rates a lot. An example I'll give is for the State of Michigan actually how opioid works. I oversaw a opioid strategy and so we were putting out data on deaths and the trajectory of deaths in the state. But one thing I asked the team to do was to go back and say, okay, we now see the trajectory, this was before 2019, trajectory is trending down for deaths. But we looked at it by race and ethnicity, we actually saw an increase for some populations. That data is important because then it helps us guide or the programs that we implement and think about our geographies and the populations that we're trying to serve. It's not just having data but really knowing how to analyze it by some populations, and geography, and social characteristics. What is the story? What is the question that you're trying to have the data answer? What's the story that the data are telling you is really important. Can you talk to us a bit about how you worked with data system designers and analysts in this important work, and how did you work with them to make sure you had the right data to begin with but then pulling it together in reports for communication, the impact? Absolutely, I'll tell you it is complicated. Often in the government or public health sector you often don't have a large team or full funding. Quite frankly, I will say that government or public health tends to be underfunded. However, that team, all of my three core roles and in government or public health, my data team has been really the backbone of everything that I've done. I think about timeliness of data, making sure the data are clean, there's not duplicates as an example. We're counting people in the right way. How are the data collected? Does it match with how we need to report it to other folks? From a state perspective we have to report nationally. Are the data being collected upfront in the right way and are we looking at it and packaging it in such a way that it can be sent to the federal government? Also what's really important is how the data are communicated publicly. Having spreadsheets and tables and Excel files means absolutely nothing to the general public. It's how you share that data visually but it's also how you talk about the data. Then data are really, they're really a story. They're really about a story, and it's a story that's telling us how a particular health issue was playing out, but also it tells us what we need to do to advance the health of our community. That's great. We've been talking in this course a lot about how it isn't just about the data it is about the story, but also the analyst need to know what the leaders and the administrators are going to be doing with the data, the context matters. I don't know do you have any stories along that line? I will say, before any speech, I give a lot of speeches, in my roles particularly in Detroit and certainly in Michigan. Any dataset there's always limitations to it. There's limitations as far as what definitive answers you can say about what the data is telling you. There's often omissions, there's just always limitations to a particular dataset. It's really important that you share that, so you understand that when you're looking at telling that story publicly or even designing your programs. I would say with COVID response certainly thinking about what our dataset and what it didn't say, and that we were still trying to always get additional data that was really important. There's so much to talk about with COVID, so I think we're going to take a little break now and then come back and have a different conversation with Dr. Khaldun about COVID data and just the immense issue of building new data systems in a moment of crisis. Thanks so much. Thank you.
