Advancing Health

In part one of this two-part conversation, John Riggi, the AHA's national advisor for cybersecurity and risk, talks with the FBI's Brett Leatherman, assistant director, Cyber Division, and Gretchen Burrier, assistant director, Office of Private Sector, about the FBI's new campaign against cyberthreats, the surge of cyberattacks in U.S. health care, and what hospitals and health systems can do right now to defend themselves.

Behind every safety metric is a leadership decision. In this conversation, Thomas McGinn, M.D., MPH, senior executive vice president and chief physician executive officer at CommonSpirit Health, shares how the organization aligns leadership, standardizes processes, and uses analytics to reduce variation and improve patient outcomes — work that made CommonSpirit Health a 2025 finalist for the AHA Quest for Quality Prize.
For more information on the AHA's Quest for Quality Prize, please visit https://www.aha.org/about/awards/quest-for-quality

Is lived experience one of the most underused tools in health care today? In this conversation, JPS Health Network's Zelia Baugh, senior vice president of behavioral health, and Melanie Cooper, peer support specialist, discuss how utilizing peer support specialists can help patients navigate recovery, improve care transitions, and drive better outcomes across inpatient units, outpatient clinics and psychiatric emergency services.

Even the most experienced health care leaders can feel lost as patients. In this conversation, Ji Im, system senior director of community and population health at CommonSpirit Health, explores why seamless navigation, community partnerships and human connection are essential to reducing friction and improving the health care experience. Ji also shares how her personal health story has reshaped her understanding of care navigation and patient-centered design.

In the first Leadership Dialogue conversation of 2026, Marc Boom, M.D., president and CEO of Houston Methodist and the 2026 AHA board chair, speaks with James Merlino, M.D., chief operating officer at Joint Commission, about building a culture of innovation, unleashing the power of new technologies to advance health care, and developing partnerships to access and share expertise, information and best practices.