The SIREN Podcast

On June 8th SIREN and Camden Coalition co-hosted a webinar about the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Accountable Health Communities Model Final Evaluation Report (published February 2026). The event included a brief report overview and a moderated discussion with AHC implementation site leaders from Colorado, New Jersey, and Oklahoma exploring their experiences with model implementation, impacts, and sustainability.

On February 12, 2026 SIREN co-directors Danielle Hessler Jones and Laura Gottlieb and Alameda Health System Medical Director of Patient Quality, Andy Quiñones-Rivera, had a conversation about assessing patients’ experiences of healthcare-based social care. Here’s the scoop: Recent state and national efforts to incentivize social care have introduced measures focused on the quantity of social risk screening or referrals. These measures fail to simultaneously assess the quality of those services, including the patient experience of having healthcare teams ask about or intervene to address social conditions. The result has been an emerging national concern that rather than leading to care improvements, healthcare-based social care activities might instead be implemented in ways that cause harm to patients, e.g., by triggering stressful reactions, stigmatizing patients, not leading to meaningful service referrals, or otherwise undermining patients’ relationships with healthcare providers. In this conversation, panelists described their recent work developing and validating the new Patient Experience of Social Care Measure, which can serve to counter-balance the current quantity-focused assessments. Access the measure here: https://sirenetwork.ucsf.edu/tools-resources/resources/patient-experience-social-care-measure

In November 2024, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) released the third evaluation report of the Accountable Health Communities (AHC) Model, in which Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries in 28 communities were screened for social risks and offered navigation to help resolve identified risks. The 177-page report is chock full of interesting findings. On May 8th Dawn Alley, former director of the AHC Model at CMMI and Head of Scale at IMPaCT Care and SIREN Co-Directors Caroline Fichtenberg and Danielle Hessler-Jones unpacked the report’s findings.

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 federal policy landscape. Content from the 2025 SIREN National Research Meeting can be viewed here: https://sirenetwork.ucsf.edu/2025-national-research-meetingThis podcast was made possible through support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Kaiser Permanente. 

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 Nichols joined virtually.) The panel explored the rapidly shifting sands of social care policy under the new administration. Panelists shared lessons from other periods in the country’s past and offered suggestions for adapting to new practical realities while staying committed to values that underpin social care.Content from the 2025 SIREN National Research Meeting can be viewed here: https://sirenetwork.ucsf.edu/2025-national-research-meetingThis podcast was made possible through support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Kaiser Permanente. 

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? Exploring the ethics of health care's involvement in social care,” Dr. Taylor dove into the question of whether it is the responsibility of the health care sector to provide social care. She brought insights from ethics, political philosophy, and management science to help the audience make decisions that simultaneously reflect the needs of both current and future sociopolitical conditions.Content from the 2025 SIREN National Research Meeting can be viewed here: https://sirenetwork.ucsf.edu/2025-national-research-meetingThis podcast was made possible through support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Kaiser Permanente. 

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 January 14, 2025, the UCSF Social Interventions Research & Evaluation Network (SIREN) and the Center for Health Law & Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School hosted a webinar to learn more about these innovative approaches and planned evaluations from state Medicaid leaders and other population health research experts. The target audience for this webinar includes health care providers, social care providers, health policy practitioners, policymakers, and researchers.

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 Shield of California Foundation and Kaiser Permanente.

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 Permanente. 

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-Lastad (UCSF) in discussion with Dr. Monica Soni, Chief Medical Officer of Covered California. Want to jump into the conversation? Join us at the Feb 2025 SIREN National Research Meeting: Advancing the Science of Social Care. Learn more at: https://sirenetwork.ucsf.edu/2025-national-research-meeting. This season of the SIREN Podcast is supported by Kaiser Permanente.