Healthcare is far from equitable, but the solution isn’t always to rebuild the current systems — sometimes it’s enough to just uplift and support those who are struggling to make ends meet.
Which is exactly what former nurse and entrepreneur Cassie Choi set out to do when she left the profession three years ago to work in
“I started to notice the different sorts of access problems that marginalized communities had,” Choi says. “I was really trying to improve the efficiency that clinicians could deliver in order to improve outcomes. If you improve the delivery system, then that improves healthcare outcomes overall.”
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Pair Team is equipped with its own care staff
Choi spoke to Employee Benefit News about the importance of strengthening the systems already in place and using technology to bring levels of support and care they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do themselves.
Why is it so important to create these bridges and connections in the healthcare system for marginalized communities?
Underserved and marginalized populations have greater barriers to accessing healthcare than other people — and we all know how hard it is to access healthcare as a “regular” person. And so [we thought], how can we use technology to reduce those barriers, to make sure that we can find all of the resources available to make it easier to access care for people.
Healthcare is a fundamental right. If you don't have healthcare, you can't access any of the other rights and freedoms that you have. It's not just about bringing people to primary care, it's about addressing social barriers like housing and access to nutrition. If you don't address those issues first, health comes after that, so we have to think about it very comprehensively and it's a big challenge. And we're not naïve enough to think that we can solve it with a silver bullet, but it requires a partnership with people in the committee to really work together and support the folks that end up in situations where sometimes you're putting food on the table takes precedence over their healthcare.
If we can make it convenient for them to take care of themselves, that’s what we want to do. Working in the space, I've seen the way the healthcare industry and staff in particular are burned out. They're being mistreated by an entire industry. They're tired.
When doing this work, why is it critical to preserve the already present ties to community initiatives such as local clinics and providers?
Community health centers have always been pillars of the community. When COVID hit, who did government and public health departments rely on to get COVID testing out and then back? These were community health centers. For decades, health centers have been granting access to free care for vaccinations, pregnancy tests and annual wellness exams, and some community health centers even provide social support, social work, support and legal services.
These communities have always been places of access for underserved communities and so there's no need to disintermediate that care. Instead, we should build on the trust that they already have, while understanding that underserved communities have this fundamental distrust in the healthcare system.
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For example, sometimes the next available appointment at the health vendor is three weeks away, but maybe a patient works three jobs and the only time that they have available is for a phone call on their break when the clinic doesn't have that appointment available and they don't offer telemedicine visits. Or maybe that person doesn't have transportation that comes to the clinic. So we can make it possible for that person to access care, which is better than no access at all.
We don't think of ourselves as a vendor to the clinic — it's so important that we have a side-by-side partnership with the clinic. We're a part of their team.
How can technology be leveraged in order to fit seamlessly into these communities and provide the kind of support that’s missing from a more traditional model?
[It enables us] do things like strategic outreach to patients to get them engaged in care and get them scheduled onto the clinics we partner with, so we provide our own nurse practitioners that are able to provide telemedicine.
We're reaching out through our platform and doing care navigation and social support services, like coordinating transportation to appointments or helping them enroll in SNAP benefits or routing them to food pantries. We're coordinating care from home and then the in-person care delivery is with our clinic partners in their community. People who may be homeless who are frequently utilizing the emergency room, or people who have severe mental illness or substance abuse disorders may be a little bit harder to reach by text message and phone calls. So we thought, how can we be the hand that extends their ability to deliver the care.
Our hands are just tech-enabled. Our forms can be automatically filled out and automatically faxed to that imaging center or clinic to make sure that that person has their mammogram done.
As a former nurse who worked on the front lines, how do platforms like Pair Team also provide support for the very staff working in these clinics and healthcare communities?
I've always really thought about how we can increase efficiency for care delivery for clinicians. I didn't become a nurse for the pay, I really care about people. All of the barriers that get put in the way start to jade and burn out healthcare providers. So we didn't create Pair Team just for the benefit of patients, we also think about how we can help our clinician partners do their work on the ground.
We think about what things should be done remotely by us, and then what technology can we develop to make the onsite team more efficient? We remove some of the many hats that people within health centers wear. People at their front desk are supposed to be outreaching to people that are overdue for care, but they're also answering the phone and checking people in and checking their insurance. We make it easier for care providers to deliver better care more efficiently and get rid of the things that providers just shouldn’t have to do.
