Founder at AI Empower. PhD ABD. Disclosure: I use human-in-loop AI as an assistant in managing this profile. Don't worry- the sass is all me 🤘🏻

Forward-thinking Technology Leader with 20+ years’ experience driving strategic innovation and organizational impact. Adept at leveraging AI, Power Platform, and collaboration solutions to deliver cost-effective, secure, and user-centric systems. Excels at bridging business and technology, guiding cross-functional teams, and championing initiatives that improve access, streamline operations, and reinforce a culture of continuous innovation—particularly within nonprofit and healthcare environments.

Cassandra Ansara

NFL Cheerleader turned EMPA | Award-winning Health Leader | Functional Medicine Advocate | International Speaker | Media Contributor | Podcaster Extraordinaire 😉

Summer 2021. I was practicing medicine in the ER drowning in lockdowns, mandates, and the special kind of despair that comes from watching a system you believed in eat itself alive.

I'd spent years in the trenches — running CDC's National Diabetes Prevention Program across four states, overseeing clinical research with Hopkins, working on the very drug trials that were shaping policy in real-time, and then treating patients in hallways who were bearing the brunt of a completely failed 'public health response' I'd always believed would save us. 

I felt powerless to fix what was broken.

So I did what any rational person would do. I started posting on LinkedIn after 14 hour night shifts with zero followers, zero strategy, and a whole lot of opinions about everything that was wrong with American healthcare.

(Spoiler: it was a lot.)

What happened next still doesn't make sense to me.

Platform reach of 300K+ weekly. A healthcare communications firm Sims Tillirson & I built from nothing. Press access covering FDA and HHS — which, for a policy nerd who geeks out over price transparency and regulatory reform, is basically the Super Bowl.

I'm not a marketing genius. I didn't have a plan. I just showed up, told the truth in plain English, and refused to shut up about fixing healthcare.

Turns out that's the job.

Translating complex policy into stories real people understand. Building coalitions of credible voices. Setting narratives instead of just responding to them.

Your clinical expertise is the competitive advantage. The system just never told you that.

Nobody is coming to save American healthcare except us. 

LFG.

Tiffany Ryder

At 21, a doctor told me I had PCOS and pre-diabetes and then handed me a Metformin prescription.

“This is just what you’ll have to live with,” she said. So I did. Until I didn’t.

(Turns out eating real food and moving your body is a treatment plan. Who knew?)

But that was the first time a strange thought crossed my mind. 

Maybe the people who say they know how this works… don’t actually know anything about how this works.

Hmm.

Years later — after the NFL, foreign medical school, PA school, the ER, and COVID — I read The Price We Pay by Dr. Marty Makary and suddenly understood things I hadn’t been able to articulate before.

- Why I’d been handed a pill instead of a lifestyle.
- Why my employment contract said I wasn’t allowed to tell patients about the clinic across the street.
- And 1000 other horrific things about the system we call ‘health care’.

(I’m still looking for a word to describe it that doesn’t start with an F-, but haven’t found one yet)

Then a realization crystallized... I could keep saving people one-by-one in the ER, but if I did, I could never fix what was actually breaking them. So I left.

And that’s the real story behind this episode- the full, messy, nonlinear version — the NFL years, the diagnosis that reversed itself, the ER shifts where the incentives finally became impossible to ignore, and the moment I realized something most clinicians eventually confront:

We can hold someone’s hand. We can stabilize them. 

Sometimes we can even save them.

But we can’t repair a system that was never designed for patients to win.

And that raises a much bigger question…Why are patients losing in the first place?

Full episode here: https://lnkd.in/eXFiUsQx

NFL Cheerleader to ER. Independent Media giving DC health policy a voice (and a personality). The government is not my doctor.

People always ask me if CrowdHealth is the real thing. After 2 years of health care outside the Matrix - totally 'uninsured'-  my answer is…

Yup. 

Best decision I ever made: https://lnkd.in/ey-i88DX

What's not to love? 

We asked FDA to say no to Pharma.
I do not mean we asked politely.

I mean we built a regulatory agency whose entire function is to tell the most profitable industry in the world that it cannot do what it wants. 

We staffed it. Funded it. Gave it authority. 
We called it public health. The name is the thing we did.

We did not build anything to protect it when Pharma pushed back.
Pharma pushed back. 

This was not a surprise. Or a betrayal. A company told no by a regulator will attempt to remove the regulator. 

This is not corruption. This is a business model. This is the norm.

Pharma funds media. Provides their operating budget. Pharmaceutical advertising is the financial infrastructure of American health journalism. 

News on FDA is brought to you by the companies the FDA regulates. 
This is disclosed in fine print. The fine print is the point.

When FDA says no, the media covers FDA. The coverage is not about the regulation. The coverage is about the regulator.

A regulation can be debated on merits. A regulator can be destroyed on character. Only one of those is reversible.

Prasad’s job is to tell Pharma no. The media’s job is to make that impossible. They ran sexual harassment allegations. The allegations didn’t exist. The original story ran everywhere. The correction came 19 days later. 

19 days is not a correction. 19 days is a strategy. Prasad is leaving. The strategy worked.

Marty Makary’s job is to tell Pharma no. The media is coming for Marty Makary. The playbook does not change. The strategy works.

We watch this happen. We call it bias. We describe it in great detail to people who already understand. 

Pharma is not threatened by people who understand what Pharma is doing. Understanding the mechanism is not the same as breaking it. 

Two things break the mechanism. The mechanism is not broken.

Leadership cover breaks it. The entire admin standing behind the regulator when the regulator says no. 

Not a statement. Not a spokesperson. A wall. 

FDA leaders who will not be abandoned can hold the line. FDA leaders who are not sure must manage exposure instead. They must do as much good as they can without being shown the door. This is a rational response. 

Public outcry works if it's loud enough to be unavoidable. Unavoidable means abandoning the regulator costs more than protecting industry. Unavoidable means silence is no longer politically safe.

Neither eliminates attacks. Attacks don’t need to be eliminated. Attacks need to be survivable; public outcry makes them so.

You have a choice.

You can know, & know that you know it, & watch what happens next. 

The show is well-produced. Outrage cycles are timed. The corrections run quietly 19 days later, if you’re lucky. 

There is a version where you live a comfortable life and FDA never regulates anything that matters & you never have to do anything.

Or you can get loud enough that protecting Pharma costs more than it's worth.

Those are the only two options. Pick one.

taplio

The Battle

Cassandra Ansara

Tiffany Ryder

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taplio

The Battle

Cassandra Ansara

Tiffany Ryder

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Tiffany Ryder's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

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