Dr. Rishi Manchanda is a physician, author and healthcare leader who has spent more than a decade developing novel strategies to improve health in resource-poor communities. He has served as director of social medicine for a network of community health centers in south central Los Angeles, as the lead primary care physician for homeless Veterans at the Greater Los Angeles VA, and as chief medical officer for a self-insured employer with a large rural immigrant workforce. In his 2013 TEDbook, The Upstream Doctors, he introduced a new model of healthcare workers who improve care by addressing patients' health-related social needs, like food, financial and housing insecurity. The book has become recommended reading in medical schools and universities across the world.
Dr. Manchanda is President of HealthBegins, a social enterprise that provides healthcare professionals and community partners with tools to improve care and the social factors that make people sick in the first place. With Mathematica Policy Research and the Center for Health Care Strategies, HealthBegins was recently selected to provide technical assistance to grantees in CMS' historic Accountable Health Communities initiative.