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.