Maria Alexander

Policy innovation requires more than a strong idea. It depends on the people, culture, and operational discipline needed to turn that idea into something that can work in practice. Pauline J. Lapin and Laurie McWright, former leaders at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation within the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, join Coral Partner Kate Freeman to reflect on lessons from their decades of public service and their recent Milbank Quarterly Opinion. Their conversation explores how leaders build teams that can navigate uncertainty, use data and stakeholder feedback without losing objectivity, align policy design with operational realities, and sustain trust and mission alignment as priorities evolve. 

Strong population health programs can still fall short when the clinical, behavioral health, and community-based organizations surrounding them lack the shared workflows, communication structures, and alignment needed to work effectively together. Purva Rawal, PhD, and Leigh Wilson-Hall, MSW, Senior Advisors at the Camden Coalition, join Coral Director Ashley Fitch to discuss the Community Ecosystem Alignment Tool, or CEAT, and how it helps organizations turn cross-sector collaboration into a more intentional and operational capability. Their conversation explores why fragmented ecosystems can undermine otherwise promising interventions, how CEAT helps partners identify and reduce friction, what implementation looks like in practice, and how stronger alignment can support better execution across maternal health, behavioral health, transitions of care, and integrated or value-based models.

Artificial intelligence has no shortage of potential applications in health care, but deciding where to begin and how to implement it responsibly is another matter. Rob Fields, MD, MHA, Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer at Beth Israel Lahey Health, joins Coral Founder Meg Koepke to discuss how the health system is putting AI into practice. Their conversation explores the organization’s rollout of ambient clinical documentation, the results and responses it has seen so far, and what leaders are learning about selecting use cases, supporting adoption, engaging patients, and managing change. 

This year's proposed physician fee schedule includes a wide range of changes that could affect accountable care organizations, clinicians, and Medicare beneficiaries—from updates to financial methodology and quality measurement to new ideas for prospective payment and specialty care.  

In this episode, Coral's Joy Chen and Maria Alexander speak with Jake Quinton, Chief Medical Officer for the Center for Medicare about which proposals matter most, what they signal about CMS’s longer-term vision for accountable care, and where CMS is seeking practical feedback from organizations working on the ground. 

In this episode of Bright Spots, Coral’s Kate Freeman speaks with Gretchen Heinen, Founder and CEO of Authsnap, about how AI-enabled tools can help reduce the administrative burden of insurance-denial appeals and medical-necessity documentation. The conversation explores how Authsnap supports clinics, hospitals, and health care organizations by streamlining work that has traditionally required hours of manual review, helping providers manage growing volumes of commercial-payer and specialty-drug denials with greater speed and accuracy. Gretchen shares how her experience as a utilization-management nurse shaped the development of Authsnap, what implementation looks like in real-world provider workflows, and what tools like Authsnap could mean for the future of prior authorization, revenue cycle operations, and patient access to care. 

Specialty care has long been one of the harder pieces of accountable care to operationalize. In this episode, Coral’s Joy Chen speaks with Theresa Dreyer, CEO of the Health Care Transformation Task Force, about what CMS’s Long-term Enhanced ACO Design, or LEAD, Model could mean for ACOs and specialty groups. They discuss why specialty engagement has been challenging across payer lines, how LEAD creates more formal pathways for ACO-specialist arrangements, what different types of specialty groups may need to consider, and what it will take for these models to move from payment design to practical changes in care delivery.