You were recently appointed Strategic Initiative Officer at the Rhode Island Foundation. Tell us about the foundation and the work you do.
The Rhode Island Foundation is a philanthropic organization that works to improve the quality of life in Rhode Island. We are a community foundation, meaning our funds come from individual, family, and organizational donors. Their generosity, the inspiring work of our development staff, and the hard work of our board of directors, leadership, and grants department allows us to support the transformative work of nonprofit organizations throughout the state. Founded in 1916, the Rhode Island Foundation is the largest funder of nonprofits in Rhode Island, and is coming off a record-breaking year of grantmaking and its fourth-best year of fundraising.
I am very grateful to have recently been appointed to the position of Strategic Initiative Officer for Healthy Lives. In this role, I lead the Foundation’s activities and grantmaking in the health sector. Within my sector, there are a variety of funds and related initiatives ranging from medical research funds for junior faculty to the Fund for Healthy Rhode Island, which supports innovative and integrated models of healthcare delivery. There are also strategy grants, which support nonprofits large and small that are engaged in work that aligns with our health sector objective of improving access to and quality of primary care for all Rhode Islanders. Because of the proactive nature of our work, we engage in discussions about healthcare reform alongside policymakers, payers, providers, and community based organizations. We listen, question, invest in innovative and proven concepts, and convene stakeholders and subject matter experts.
I’ve been listening to the leaders of state, local and community-based organizations to learn from their experiences and perspectives, and to think about what resources and conversations are needed to continue to improve health in Rhode Island. For example, improved child health can reduce school absenteeism and in turn, improve school performance. Likewise, higher educational attainment is associated with better health status. The multidisciplinary approach to improving the quality of life for Rhode Islanders is one of the many things that I like about the Rhode Island Foundation.
In addition to working at the Rhode Island Foundation you are very busy doing other things. You are adjunct faculty in the University of Rhode Island and served as the Training Officer for the Providence Fire Department. You were also a member of the Emergency Medical Services Innovations Workgroup and the Overdose Data Working Group at the Rhode Island Department of Health. Tell us more about these jobs.
I have been involved in public safety in a variety of settings for over 20 years, the last 15 with the Providence Fire Department. Emergency responders have a unique perspective on health and the healthcare system. They often encounter people during their moment of greatest medical or social need, just like doctors and nurses. However, when you encounter patients in their home environment, you have a first-hand look at their context, their social network, the social and environmental determinants of health that impact their immediate health needs and long term health outcomes.
We have a very complicated healthcare system, which can provide great care, but for many is difficult to navigate, has limited capacity in some areas, or delivers care in silos without continuity or coordination between settings. Some opportunities for improvement include the management of chronic health conditions; frequent users of EMS and/or the emergency department; addressing behavioral health needs. Seeing some scenarios and patients over and over again motivated me to pursue a Master of Public Health degree, which provided me with the knowledge and skills to contribute to systems-level changes which will hopefully improve health outcomes.
After completing my MPH at Brown, I began to participate in workgroups that were tackling some tough challenges facing the state: drug overdoses, and frequent users of the 9-1-1 system and hospital emergency departments. The EMS Innovations Workgroup consisted of municipal Fire/EMS leaders, representatives from hospitals, health centers, visiting nurse organizations, and the department of health. One outgrowth from that workgroup was the decision to pursue an innovative collaboration between EMS providers and primary care providers—Mobile Integrated Healthcare (also known as Community Paramedicine), a model that is seeing very positive results in reducing healthcare utilization and costs in urban and rural communities across the US, and my understanding is that it is close to being implemented locally.
I also had the opportunity to work alongside Professor Judith Bentkover as a Teaching Associate for the first three cohorts of the Executive Master of Healthcare Leadership program at Brown’s School of Professional Studies. After two years with the EMHL program, the University of Rhode Island invited me to teach their Health Services Administration undergraduate course, which I have done for the past two years. The opportunity to stimulate thought in future potential healthcare leaders is another means by which I hope to affect systems-level changes.
Did you always want to work in public health?
I guess in some shape or form, yes. As an undergraduate, I took a perspective-changing course in Medical Anthropology, and became more interested in the non-medical contributors to health outcomes. Later on, after learning that the delivery of healthcare only accounts for roughly 10 percent of health outcomes, I became interested in social and environmental determinants of health and other public healthcare topics in addition to the delivery of healthcare.
What was your most influential moment at Brown University?
There are many moments and relationships that were influential at Brown. I’ll give you two if that’s ok. The first moment was during a Graduate School convocation speech in 2011. Dean Peter Weber remarked about the different ways that undergraduate, master’s level, and doctoral level students interact with knowledge. Undergraduates acquire knowledge. Masters students apply knowledge. Doctoral students synthesize knowledge. In reality, there is some overlap in those areas, but Dean Weber’s summary helped establish my framework for learning during graduate school.