\u201cStuff I never imagined would happen is routine, and all of that is innovative,\u201d Cardon explains. \u201cYou know, the fact that we’re replacing aortic valves with a catheter is insane. When I started practice, you wouldn’t even have thought that was possible, yet it’s now become no big deal \u2013 nobody even thinks about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Cardon says the part of practicing medicine that hasn\u2019t changed nearly as much in the last 30 years is how patients engage and interact with the health care system, and that system often creates barriers for people who lack access to it \u2013 or who might not have much trust in it at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’re getting to the point to where we have all the tools and the medications to take really good care of people, yet we still find these huge disparities \u2013 people not on appropriate therapy, people having difficulty getting into care, all sorts of things that are really not improving the outcomes of the patients that we\u2019re serving,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd that’s because we’ve not innovated in the way we’ve delivered<\/em> care. We’ve innovated the medicine behind it, but not the delivery of care.\u201d<\/p>\n Innovation is key, he says, and sometimes it takes engaging people outside of the system \u2013 people with fresh eyes, fresh perspectives, and fresh ideas \u2013 to truly innovate change.<\/p>\n Which is one reason why Hartford HealthCare partnered with UConn\u2019s Peter J. Werth Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation<\/a> this past spring and summer on a unique pilot program called HeathWerx to engage some innovative new perspectives \u2013 and to offer UConn undergraduates a transformative close-up look at community health.<\/p>\n Welcome to the Neighborhood<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThe HealthWerx program was brought in as a way for UConn students to really begin to engage hands-on with health care equity issues,\u201d says Zoey England \u201922 (CLAS), the chief of staff at the Werth Institute who led the first HealthWerx cohort. \u201cA lot of times students don’t see those sorts of things or have opportunities to do that before going into graduate programs.\u201d<\/p>\n HealthWerx was conceived as an experiential learning program centered on health care innovation. The program started with a course in the spring 2023 semester that carried into a full-time internship over the summer.<\/p>\n HealthWerx was geared toward students with an interest in health care issues, but opened to undergraduate applicants from all UConn schools and colleges from all majors.<\/p>\n \u201cAnyone who was really interested and excited about diversity, equity, inclusion \u2013 because most people don’t really think about health equity early on,\u201d says England. \u201cIf people were excited about that, then this space was for them to come and apply those sort of skill sets to health care.\u201d<\/p>\n It was over the spring semester that the eight students in the pilot cohort were engaged to learn about social determinants of health and the health care access and disparity issues people face in both urban and rural Connecticut communities.<\/p>\n For many in the cohort, England notes, it was the first time that they were thinking about concepts of entrepreneurship and how those concepts might fit into their own goals, both personal and professional.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also where the students partnered with Hartford HealthCare\u2019s Neighborhood Health<\/a> teams.<\/p>\n In the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cardon says that Hartford HealthCare realized it needed to do something different in order to reach some of Connecticut\u2019s most vulnerable populations.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had committed to make sure that no communities were left behind \u2013 we were not going to look back at this and realize that in Hartford, or downtown Bridgeport, we were going to find that, hey, we did it again,\u201d he says, and to meet that need, Hartford HealthCare launched a new mobile testing and vaccination initiative, partnering with local community organizations on the effort.<\/p>\n \u201cWe did a much better job than I think many anticipated, in terms of getting vaccines to people and trying to control that,\u201d Cardon says. \u201cStill not where it needs to be, but better.\u201d<\/p>\n The initiative worked well at both engaging members of the community in need of access to health services and at building trust and vital new partnerships, and as the impact of the pandemic began to ease, Hartford HealthCare didn\u2019t want to lose that progress.<\/p>\n Post-pandemic, the initiative transitioned into the Neighborhood Health<\/a> program that currently operates with two mobile teams and a variety of partnerships with community organizations around the state. The Neighborhood clinics work to connect community members not only with health care services, but also social services and other needs.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’re not just out there checking blood pressures and doing blood tests,\u201d Cardon explains, \u201cbut oftentimes we are supplying basic needs \u2013 reading glasses, a pair of shoes, a place to shower, trying to connect them into social services when people are really lost and don’t know what to do.\u201d<\/p>\n The model is working, Cardon says, and Hartford HealthCare is looking for ways to scale it into more areas of the state. But even within the model, there are still challenges, including how to make it sustainable and more accessible.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s where the students were able to offer a fresh perspective.<\/p>\n \u201cAs we worked with leadership, the goal was to help coach and mentor the students and have them go, learn, come back, identify problems, come up with solutions to those problems that could have an impact, and allow us to figure out how do we then take those and continue to move,\u201d Cardon says, with the idea not being a one-off.<\/p>\n \u201cThis could be a multi-year effort,\u201d he says, \u201cwith certain students handing off their projects to other students as they come on, to build something in a really robust way and to encourage some very young, thoughtful people, not encumbered with the burdens of history, to come in and ask, \u2018You know, why are you doing it that way?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe first half was about understanding what community health is, and we specifically looked through the lens of Connecticut,\u201d says Sophia Manos \u201924 (CLAS), a physiology and neurobiology student and Werth Innovator<\/a> who took part in the pilot cohort. \u201cWe looked at data sets and different stories to really bring it home and focus on the environment around us and what people are actually going through.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then the second half was building upon that, but understanding what entrepreneurship is, because for a lot of us, we aren’t learning about that elsewhere. So, understanding first what it is, and then how you can apply entrepreneurship to things like community health.\u201d<\/p>\n Identifying Opportunities<\/strong><\/p>\n Unlike Manos, Genesis Rosario \u201924 (CAHNR), an allied health sciences major, wasn\u2019t a part of the Werth Institute when she decided to join the HealthWerx pilot cohort. Rosario is from Hartford, and she\u2019s a McNair Scholar<\/a> with a strong interest in research, but HealthWerx interested her because of its focus on both innovation and community.<\/p>\n \u201cNot only do I want to innovate medicine, I want to make sure that I can learn more about the community that I came from,\u201d she says. \u201cHealthWerx was really an open opportunity for students from different backgrounds to just look at the counties of Connecticut and look at the public health system in different areas \u2013 people with higher income have different insurances, learning about Medicaid versus Medicare \u2013 things that I didn’t even understand.\u201d<\/p>\n During the spring semester, in addition to weekly discussions with England in class, Manos, Rosario, and the cohort members visited various Neighborhood Health clinics, interacting with the staff there, speaking with patients, and pitching in to lend a hand.<\/p>\n \u201cI specifically went to the Covenant Soup Kitchen in Willimantic, where I helped with not only food preparation and things like that, but with clinical intake,\u201d Rosario says. \u201cI was there helping with the maintenance, but I was also there looking at the clinic, seeing the functionality of when patients come in.\u201d<\/p>\n Each location was different, Manos explains, and no day at one of the clinics was the same.<\/p>\n \u201cYou might go to one location where the neighborhood is predominantly Spanish-speaking,\u201d Manos says. \u201cA lot of people that come in don’t speak English as a first language, so we’re seeing that barrier to access.”<\/p>\n After spending time in the clinics working alongside the staff and their community partners, the students broke into pairs to develop ideas for solutions to some of the problems they identified.<\/p>\n For Rosario and her partner, one of their proposed solutions was the addition of Neighborhood Health ambassadors to the clinic, who would serve as communication and service conduits between clients and providers.<\/p>\n \u201cThey could come into the clinic and help in the waiting room areas,\u201d she says. \u201cSome of the patients just sat there, and they looked very timid. Where am I? What’s going on? Who’s going to give me the shot? That kind of thing. And if we had the Neighborhood Health ambassador program, it would allow people to go into the clinic and be that vessel for communication, be that vessel for comfortability.\u201d<\/p>\n Cardon says that feedback from his teams about engagement with the UConn students, and about the proposals they offered, was positive.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of the folks who jump into this work, they are engaging, they want to bring people along, and they bring a passion to this that just is infectious,\u201d he says. \u201cThey see this opportunity of working with students is an opportunity to coach and mentor. As the pilot ran down and the students identified their opportunities, now we have to look at that and say, you know, they were really good ideas, but how to we continue the progress, implement it, refine it, and build on it as we go forward?\u201d<\/p>\n Immersive Experiences<\/strong><\/p>\n Five of the initial eight cohort students \u2013 including Rosario and Manos \u2013 continued on into the summer portion of HealthWerx, and each student was matched with a partner company for an immersive 30-hour-per-week internship experience.<\/p>\n \u201cWe worked with Connecticut Innovations<\/a> and CT Next<\/a> to identify startups that would be willing to accept interns and would be a great place for them to really delve in and see innovation hands on,\u201d says England. \u201cAnd so, we had four at different startups and one at Hartford HealthCare Innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n Rosario was matched with Intellihealth<\/a>, where she worked remotely with the startup\u2019s team on its Evolve platform \u2013 an app working to connect care providers with patients who are seeking specialized obesity-related treatment and support \u2013 and helped with developing candidate searches, learning how to use AI technologies to help in that process.<\/p>\n The experience opened a whole new world of possible opportunities for Rosario that she says she didn\u2019t know were possible in the health care space.<\/p>\n \u201cI never knew that there was literally a digital startup world that really focused on certain needs \u2013 I didn’t know this,\u201d says Rosario, who says she hopes to potentially launch her own nonprofit startup one day, with a focus on health literacy in lower-income communities. \u201cI think entrepreneurship can be expansive, and it\u2019s important.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Members](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/3C176BBA-1C3F-4F22-8E4D-98DEBCC5FFB8-300x225.jpg\")