Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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This is Josh Sharfstein. Today, entrepreneurship and public health.

I speak to Dr. Rebecca

Gee, the former Commissioner of Health for the state of Louisiana, and now the founder of a

startup company called Nest Health that provides home-based care to young families. You can see

more about the company at nesthealth.com. Let's listen. Dr. Rebeccage, thanks so much for joining us on public health on call.

I want to introduce you to our podcast listeners as a public health official. Before we talk about

your shift to entrepreneurship, you were the Secretary of Health for the State of Louisiana.

What was that like? It was fantastic, Josh.

We were able to do a great deal of good in terms of expanding Medicaid, efforts to reduce or

eliminate maternal mortality when possible. It was just fantastic. It was, of course, a political

crucible. So that always made it fun, but it was a super job and a great opportunity to make some good changes.

I just recall when you were House Secretary that people were very excited about what you were doing, maternal mortality, equity, hepatitis C, other projects, thinking about things differently.

And then when you step down, for a period of time, you went into academic institution.

It was a little, look, I helped lead LSU through COVID, which was really important,

was able to use those public health skills and disaster response skills that I'd honed as secretary.

But some days it felt like watching paint dry.

And so I started getting antsy and looking around

for how I could make an impact and be a little bit more creative in the day-to-day world.

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