Public Health Is Everywhere — Including Where You Work ... And In Your Community, too.
- Team MDA Solutions LLC
- Apr 29
- 3 min read
Published by Michele D. Alexander | MDA Solutions LLC
Last month, I had the privilege of joining Dr. Chrissy Huntley on the Public Health Epidemiology Conversations (PHEC) Podcast, alongside Dr. Sarah Hartzell and Alexandra Piatkowski, MPH. The episode is called "Public Health Is Everywhere," and that title is exactly right.
If you've ever struggled to explain what public health actually does outside of an emergency, this conversation is worth your time.
The Question That Never Gets Easier to Answer
What do you actually do?
Anyone who works in healthcare operations, workforce development, or public health knows how hard that question is to answer in a way that truly lands. We spent time in this episode unpacking it — and what came through clearly is that the most effective answer isn't a definition. It's a story.
Seatbelt laws. Highway rumble strips. The cones around a sidewalk pothole. These aren't just safety features. They are public health initiatives. And when people can connect the work to something tangible they already recognize, awareness starts to build.
The Story I Shared on the Podcast
I told a story on the show that has stayed with me for years.
I was working with a woman at a mental health clinic — workforce development work, helping people get back to employment and back to themselves. When we started, she said to me: "If I make forty thousand dollars, I'll be doing great."
She ended up making six figures. She bought a home. She changed the trajectory of her family's life.
That's public health.
Not the emergency version. The quiet, sustained version that shows up in workforce development, in behavioral health pathways, in the work of helping people see what's actually possible for them — and then building the systems that get them there.
This is also, at its core, why I do the work I do at MDA Solutions. Healthcare operations and public health are not separate disciplines. They share the same fundamental goal: getting people the care and support they need, delivered by organizations that are actually equipped to provide it.
What the Roundtable Covered
The conversation went well beyond definitions. A few highlights worth noting for healthcare leaders:
The behavioral health workforce shortage is a public health crisis. Dr. Sarah Hartzell spoke candidly about the shortage of therapists, social workers, and behavioral health providers — and the creative workforce development strategies her team in Nevada is using to address it, including going directly to high school career fairs. When you recruit locally, you're more likely to serve locally.
Senior loneliness is an underrecognized operational challenge. Alexandra Piatkowski shared her work with the Toronto Council on Aging, describing how isolation among older adults has measurable consequences for both mental and physical health. For healthcare organizations serving aging populations, this is not a background issue — it's a clinical one.
Prevention is invisible when it works. The diseases that were stopped, the accidents that never happened, the crises that never arrived — these are the wins that don't make headlines. For healthcare organizations, this has a direct operational parallel: the compliance gap that never became an audit, the workflow fix that prevented the documentation error, the training that stopped the breach before it started.
Why This Matters for Healthcare Organizations
Public health and healthcare operations intersect at every level of care delivery — in how organizations build their workforce, how they design their workflows, how they document and report, and how they serve populations that have historically been overlooked.
At MDA Solutions, we work at that intersection every day. Whether it's EHR optimization, HIPAA AI compliance, quality improvement, or executive advisory, the through-line is always the same: building organizations that are operationally ready to deliver on what they promise.
If the work we discussed in this episode connects to challenges your organization is navigating — workforce readiness, behavioral health operations, compliance, or value-based care preparation — we'd welcome a conversation.
Thank you to Dr. Chrissy Huntley for the invitation, and to Dr. Sarah Hartzell and Alexandra Piatkowski for a conversation that was as honest as it was practical.
For more on the PHEC Podcast, visit drchhuntley.com. For more on Michele Alexander and MDA Solutions LLC, visit mdasolutionsllc.com.
Tags: Public Health | Workforce Development | Behavioral Health | Healthcare Operations | Healthcare Leadership | Community Health | Podcast Feature
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