In the latest episode of Impetus Digital‘s Fireside Chat, I sat down with Jeannie Chen, Head of Clinical Operations and People at Hazel Health, to discuss telemedicine and virtual care as means to improve healthcare access and equity among school-aged children. Among many other things, we also dived into the secondary effects of COVID-19 on mental health among children, teenagers, and families, and how to best support them during and after the pandemic.
Here is a preview of our conversation:
Q: Longitudinal review or view on a person and their wellness over time is a huge need or gap. What tools and services is Hazel Health utilizing in order to bridge that gap and what makes Hazel different from all the other entities and organizations that are similar to you?
A: That’s a great question, Natalie. I think first and foremost, our entire service and platform are really based on serving kids at school and in partnership with school districts. We really understand the differences between FERPA and HIPAA and in what situations there is a legitimate educational reason that we can actually disclose something to the school and work together and help that family. We also really understand cultural competency issues, things like immigration, and [families being] worried about tapping into a kind of public charge, for example, making that connection with families and just understanding where they’re at and helping them take that next step.
From a technology standpoint, we have amazing engineers and I have to say, living and working in more traditional healthcare arenas, where we would just call it “IT,” we really struggled with the technology platform. Our engineers [at Hazel] come from places like Google and Apple and redesigned everything to be centered around the students and around the provider. Some of the questions that they’ll always ask us would be, “Why is it that way?”, “Why does it have to be that way?”. “Well, it’s always been that way.” I remember the Chief Technology Officer and I had the conversation very early on and he asked, “Why do we actually need to have a chart?”
Of course, we do have an EMR and a charting system, but the way that it’s been created is much more of a natural flow of the conversations that we have and also it’s the information that the providers need at the time that they need it. Some of the connection points as well: being able to have the provider that had met with a student beforehand, made a connection, or having a preferred provider, for example. They already know the history but also they were able to capture it so if someone does happen to pick up, they’re able to get as much information as possible…
For more of our discussion, you can watch the whole Fireside Chat with Jeannie Chen, or listen to the podcast version, below.
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Impetus Digital is the spark behind sustained healthcare stakeholder communication, collaboration, education, and insight synthesis. Our best-in-class technology and professional services ensure that life science organizations around the world can easily and cost-effectively grow and prosper—from brand or idea discovery to development, commercialization, execution, and beyond—in collaboration with colleagues, customers, healthcare providers, payers, and patients.