This week on The Dose podcast, host Joel Bervell talks to Michelle Morse, New York City’s first-ever chief medical officer. Starting in her role at the height of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Morse quickly understood the importance of establishing strong connections between the health department and the city’s health care providers to help close gaps in equity, choose where to focus resources, and coordinate testing and vaccination efforts.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Morse talks about Black New Yorkers’ disproportionately high rates of premature death, having racism declared a public health crisis in New York City, using community health workers to reach people where they live, and tracking the connection between wealth gaps and health outcomes. She also discusses the use of race in clinical algorithms that have “solidified racial inequities instead of trying to fix them and end them.”

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