Empowering Equity: Transforming Clinical Spaces with Community Care
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Welcome to our latest podcast episode, where I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with the incredible Dr. Omolara Uwemedimo.
Today's conversation is a testament to the power of resilience, innovation, and community in healthcare.
Dr. Omolara shares her journey from being a pediatrician to founding two revolutionary organizations aimed at transforming healthcare for under-resourced communities. Through Strong Children Wellness and Melanin and Medicine, she is not just treating patients but also addressing systemic barriers to access and sustainability in healthcare for BIPOC communities.
Our dialogue covers the challenges of funding in primary care, the importance of community partnerships, and the innovative business models that can empower healthcare professionals to serve better and more sustainably. Dr. Omolara's story is one of overcoming personal and professional hurdles, including a diagnosis that led her to reevaluate her approach to work and life, underscoring the importance of self-care in our mission to care for others.
For those inspired by Dr. Omolara's vision, she shares valuable advice on building interprofessional collaborations and leveraging community resources to create impactful healthcare solutions. Whether you're a student, a new grad, or a seasoned clinician, there's much to learn from Dr. Omolara's approach to making healthcare more equitable and accessible.
Connect with Dr. Omolara on LinkedIn for more insights and resources on building a more inclusive healthcare system. To learn more about her work, visit Melanin and Medicine and Strong Children Wellness. Let's continue to support each other in our journeys, fostering a healthcare community that's not just about treating illness but building a healthier, more just world.
Let's keep the conversation going and work together towards a brighter, healthier future for all communities.
In today’s episode, we talk about:
Dr. Omolara's transition from pediatrician to healthcare revolutionary.
Strategies for building interprofessional collaborations and leveraging community resources.
Efforts through her organizations to overcome healthcare access and sustainability challenges.
The crucial role of community collaborations and innovative business models in enhancing healthcare delivery.
Dr. Omolara's personal challenges highlighting the importance of self-care for healthcare professionals.
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Speaker 1 (00:01.962)
Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. This has been such, I was looking back at my email and it's been quite a long time in the making trying to meet up and have this conversation. So thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much, Liz. I'm super excited.
That's awesome. Do you want to start by introducing yourself?
Yeah, so my name is Dr. Omolara Thomas-Uwemedimo. I am a pediatrician. I'm I like to say born and bred New Yorker, but I'm also the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. And I think that that's really important. I think a lot of us go into what we do and not who we are actually. And so I, my career focus right now is actually transitioning from just.
you know, doing clinical medicine as a pediatrician, which I've been doing for 20 years into running two organizations, one being Strong Children Wellness, which is an integrated care practice, a community-based integrated care practice based in New York, where myself and my co-founders, Dr. Souza and Dr. Nicole Brown actually tried to bring and integrate primary care, mental health care, and social care coordination in under-resourced communities of color.
Speaker 2 (01:17.23)
based in New York and we partner with community-based organizations to bring our care into their organizations and closer to the communities they serve. And along those lines, I also am the founder and CEO of Melanin and Medicine, which is the healthcare consulting company that focuses on increasing the sustainability of BIPOC led practices.
and being able to help them develop contractual partnerships with nonprofits, with organizations, schools, non-traditional healthcare organizations to basically increase access for communities of color and also help them to be able to sustainably and financially continue to grow while serving under-resourced communities.
So impressive. just you're just an amazing person. And I mean, I said this to you before we started recording, but I just like I so wish we had the record button on when we first talked because they just you're just you're just amazing. I wonder, are you if you're feeling comfortable? Well, I guess one quick note I just want to put in before I ask this question is like I one of the things I knew when I talked about this a little bit before, but what I've talked about at least either on the YouTube channel or on the podcast.
briefly mentioning is that one of the things that's really challenging about working in federally qualified health centers or under-resourced communities or under-resourced clinics or if it's a private practice, even one of the challenges that people run into is just funding, is having enough money to not just so much of what we do in primary care. This is just a lay context for people who are either students or newer clinicians. So much of what we do in primary care is like it's
You see patients, you get paid. You see patients, you get paid. And when you have extra funding options like grants or some other options, which we can get into if you want to, when we have options, it allows us to do more of the big work that we want to do in terms of improving health care, improving community care. I just like to set that context for people of that's kind of what you help people with in terms of especially the second company.
Speaker 1 (03:31.022)
is helping people access that funding so that they can do the big things that they want to do, whether it's work on larger or smaller projects, things like that. But I wanted to ask you, if you feel comfortable, do first of do you want to add anything to that? And then second of all, if you want to, if you feel comfortable, if you want to share a little bit of your story of like how you got to this place, I just, I was so impacted by that. Whatever you feel comfortable sharing.
course. Yeah, and I think we'll get to both of those this way. think starting with the journey is really helpful because, know, it's not a typical journey, I would say, in terms of where, you know.
so inspiring, it's amazing. Sorry, go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt you.
it's just funny because it definitely, if you asked me when I first started, what are you going to do? It definitely was not being an entrepreneur and definitely not doing it two times. And so I think ultimately for me, my goal, and I mentioned my background growing up in a Nigerian household and that was really important for me in terms of being able to experience not only injustice, just in terms of what we experienced
as being in a black community in the US, but also to see it at a different scale during my travels back to Nigeria in childhood. And that kind of cemented this like undercurrent, I would like to say theme of how can the, what I think I wanna do with my life actually provide more justice and fairness for the people who I wanna serve. And so ultimately,
Speaker 2 (05:08.448)
my journey really was trying to, and it still is, and I think this is going to be really important for those listening, is that we go into medicine sometimes in a way of this is what we wanna do and we find out things. And we're like, this actually doesn't fit for me. And so the initial stage of what I thought when I was thinking about this was to become a pediatrician and to be a pediatrician in communities
that were experiencing health injustice. And for me, because of my exposure in global settings and seeing the enormity of the dearth of physicians and specifically pediatricians within low income countries, I felt compelled to go to medical school and do global health work in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and ultimately finish residency and do work.
abroad. I actually asked the residency to my mother's chagrin instead of getting a good paying job here in the US as an attending and like, you know, addressing my medical school debt. I decided to travel to Malawi and go work there for a very much lower salary working with HIV infected youth and being able to help support
getting HIV-affected youth on antiretrovirals and staying alive. And so during that time, what was really important for me was recognizing, and this is where the evolution happens, I was providing clinical care and it was helpful for those patients. However, what I was not able to do in the clinic was able to remove the transportation barriers that our families had, was able to
deal with the stockouts when medicine wasn't available for certain families. I wasn't able to deal with what we call the upstream issues. I wasn't able to deal with the fact that they had to travel multiple like tens of miles to get without bus fare or anything like that to get to this one clinic that had all of these pediatricians. And so during that time,
Speaker 2 (07:24.538)
I actually volunteered with another one of my colleagues there to work in the northern, more rural part to basically help with scaling up pediatric HIV, which meant training, going to different areas in our van, training the staff there on how to do, the local staff, training them on how to start kids, identify kids on antiretrovirals. And that work was so
meaningful to me, but had nothing to do with me actually seeing a patient. was all training and then helping them develop a system on how they're going to make sure that we document how many kids are actually seen. And all of that, what I found out later was public health and health system strengthening. And so that inspired me to do that first evolution, which was move from clinical to now think about how could I actually do this
work on a population level and really support improving health justice for our populations, not for a one-on-one, but thinking about how we could build systems. So I ended up leaving, coming back to, after about, I think it was 13 months, coming back to the US to do an MPH. And during that time, I got involved in academia and doing research on how to improve access and utilization.
for children in sub-Saharan Africa. did some work in South Africa. And the reason I'm going in depth in this is because I want people to understand how circuitous this is and how...
I'm following you, especially the experienced clinician. I'm like, yes, I know I'm on the track, but thank you for laying those planks for people, especially newer people. It's all related. Go ahead.
Speaker 2 (09:10.798)
and how to not be scared of when you're like, this is what my vision was and it's completely shifting. And so during that time of doing research, one of the things that I realized was I wanted to get more of us in these settings globally that I was working in and working on research and I actually got recruited
to now become a global health director and create a program where we could train physicians here to do work in both global settings, but also called global settings. So areas that were very deeply underserved. indigenous like reservations, migrant work here in the US work with undocumented immigrants. And so ultimately I've spent, I shifted from research and actually spent a huge amount of my time
doing training and working with residents and deploying them, building up partnerships with organizations in both here in the US and then globally in India, Kenya, Dominican Republic to be able to make sure that residents had the opportunity to know how they could deliver care in areas that were low resource and also areas that were deeply marginalized and how to do that effectively.
While I was doing that, however, I was also seeing patients in Queens, New York. I was also teaching an MPH program and an associate professor doing that in global health. And then I was also running two research programs in my institution that were focused on addressing social issues and how
Just on the side, you know, no big deal.
Speaker 2 (11:06.754)
How do we use the clinical setting to address food insecurity, housing insecurity? These were the things that I was seeing in my clinical work. So I'm doing all of that. And as you may imagine, it's very predictable to everyone but me, was that I got burnt.
was gonna say, are you getting burnt out here? feel like I'm getting a little tired. I'm tired on your behalf thinking about all of that on your plate.
And ultimately I decided, okay, let me step back a little bit from the clinical work. But I ended up filling that with doing advocacy work for immigrant families, particularly because it was in a time when during the Trump presidency and they were being attacked about a policy called public charge. So I was doing that work and I actually ended up hospitalized after about six months of just
not sitting down. I actually ended up in the course of a week losing the ability to walk. Suddenly I was nauseous and in day had some dizziness and then I couldn't use my right arm and leg. And so ultimately that hospitalization ended up leading to a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. And this is the other evolution, is
The idea when I finally realized I was in hospital and I had to give up my work, I couldn't actually do it. And they had to find five people to be able to do my
Speaker 1 (12:40.814)
do your job. To do your one job that you were doing. my God.
Exactly. And so that was a revelation. And the next part of my evolution, which was where my doctor told me that if I continued on this path, I probably would have multiple flares from multiple sclerosis and would probably end up in a wheelchair. And so I went to my institution to try and see if I could get support to be able to do this work, streamline it. But
they did not have the capacity or resources to be able to honor that request. And that was the decision I had to make of do I shift or do I decide, look, I have to do what I've been doing and I just have to deal. And I think that the decision of course was that I needed to figure out a way to shift from this. I didn't know what that looked like, but I did know that over
that year, myself and two other black female physicians who ended up being my co-founders of Strong Children Wellness were collectively frustrated with the care that we were providing. And so ultimately, even though I was in the hospital and I'm leaving for about four months, they were helping us to bring to fruition the idea that we had, which was to build out Strong Children Wellness and be able to
provide care closer to the community than partnership with the communities and not have healthcare be siloed in this large institution, but decentralized into the organizations that really have the credibility buy-in and the trust of communities. So that was kind of the evolution, and that was in 2019 that led me to where I am right now, and it's been circuitous.
Speaker 2 (14:35.918)
But it's also been really interesting and eye-opening in terms of just seeing kind of what the traditional path looks like usually for people and what are the different obstacles that can come up during.
gosh, I just love that so much. It's just such a beautiful story. And like, it's so relatable on so many levels, because I think so many people, like you said, like go into healthcare, because they want they have a vision of what it means and what they want to do. And then they get there. And not only is the is it more complicated, I think this I think this is a universal experience is it's more complicated than we expect. And then we may not have the agency that we thought we did.
Or it might just not, it might be that it's not really what we actually wanted. Right. And so I just really love you sharing that like really complex and beautiful story and like such a big heart that you have and so much ambition that you have. And I just feel like it's so, so it's going to be so meaningful for people to hear this because so many people are in that position. I think, you know, whether you're a student and you kind of like our new grad and you're kind of in this like brand new situation of like
you what am I here for? What am I doing? Or if you're kind of further into practice after a couple of years, and you're like, what am I doing? And you're kind of like trying to figure that piece out of like, I like this, but I'm not really sure.
And I think, you know, how this relates to your other question, which was about the financial difficulties and challenges. You know, one of the things that was that we didn't get to see as much initially as, you know, academic clinicians inside of large healthcare institutions based in New York was what happens behind the scenes in terms of.
Speaker 2 (16:22.958)
how does a visit get reimbursed and what does Medicaid look like? And unfortunately, what we've now realized, which I think was hidden from us, is that healthcare has really turned into a profit-driven industry rather than a purpose-driven industry. You would assume that it would be more purpose-driven since we're dealing with like...
people's lives, right?
But not here in America. And so, you know, one of the things that I think is interesting for us was how could we get back to the purpose and make sure that even if we wanted to do this on our own, how would we be in a place where we could make decisions that were based on the value and what we were bringing to patients and make sure that
we were doing it based on the impact and not how much income we would be able to take home, right? And so what that meant was starting to think about a business model for this that was also socially impactful as well. So a business model that made sure that we could be sustainable and make money to continue providing the services, but having the impact.
on there. And so we ended up becoming a for-profit social enterprise. And that was done intentionally because we also didn't want to be completely dependent on the kindness of. there are friends and all of that. But we wanted to be able to, we knew from our work as academics inside of institutions that we had a skillset of if this didn't, if this wasn't available for our patients.
Speaker 1 (17:58.702)
100 %
Speaker 2 (18:16.268)
we could write it into existence. So that was where we started learning how to write grants and put them together and find the right people to be able to fund. And so from that experience, all three of us were doing that. We decided when we said, okay, we're going to embark on this, we had a different perspective that I think is different from people who don't maybe have that background, which was we're not going to just find capital and go in and like, you know, find a loan, but
why don't we write a grant for this? Why don't we put this together? Now, the only issue was unlike our institutions, which qualify as tax exempt and have access to grant dollars, we were not as a for-profit. And so what we realized was what do we have available? And that's gonna be a really important piece for anybody who's thinking about the ideas and things that they wanna bring to fruition is not.
saying, I'm gonna need this, I'm gonna need that. But what is it that you actually have? And what we had were partnerships. We did already have connections with community-based organizations who were chomping at the bit to try and figure out how they could bring healthcare services to their families. And so we went to one of my longtime partners and said, we wanna figure out if we can build this model where we can actually bring primary care into your organization.
And of course they were excited and they and we said this is the model. This is what it would look like. And they allow for us to be able to bring that jointly to one of their past funders and say this is something new that we want to embark on. And that was how we got our without, you know, anything on the ground. had nothing to have what was written on the paper. We got after $125,000 to be able to put into it. So.
That is one of the models that we've been able to utilize to support. grants through partnerships, it's called fiscal sponsorship. But then the other one that we were able to also utilize is contracts by being able to say, what areas, what places need healthcare, need healthcare services and.
Speaker 2 (20:34.626)
they want them to be embedded and inside of their organizations and what organizations have access to have financial solvency to be able to pay for that. And so another model in addition to the work that we do embedded within community-based organizations is that we outsource some of our providers to serve organizations that serve psychosocial and complex youth.
foster care agencies, residential treatment facilities, they actually will pay us monthly to help make sure that we can bring our providers right there into their organizations to provide continuous care. So those are two of the things, contracts, grant dollars, and then of course, just trying to figure out ways that we can really look at the Medicaid system, which is highly flawed and very complex.
but ways that we could look at how we could, where are there potential opportunities to provide even more in-depth care for families? And one of the great places that we've been doing that is looking at behavioral health and case management and integrating that. And that actually has made our primary care and our health outcomes much stronger. Because of the fact that we're able to now expand and provide mental health and
and social care coordination and management for our family.
I love that. so just to back up for a second. So when you're talking about, so I just want to re-presence people who are not familiar with your work, that the first company you mentioned is a private, and correct me if I'm misunderstanding, but it's like a private practice.
Speaker 1 (22:25.09)
but that is really like a wraparound community service where it has the social, not just primary care, but all of the kind of like social structures that are needed. And the way that you fund, and you have multiple sites, correct? And then the way that you've figured out how to fund them is through these community partnerships, is that correct?
Correct. So the community partners are really important. Like community partners sometimes on their own will identify grant opportunities and say, hey, can we write you in for like to be able to provide health services, you know, for our families here and for the community and they'll write us in and, you know, but we're also, we've also been really diligent in finding opportunities.
They're not often, but grants that are available to for-profits. So far, we've been able to secure about 1.4 million in grants since we started in 2020, through partnership and then on our own to be able to provide the services that we provide outside of our reimbursement and our revenue.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:35.04)
Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. Can do you would it be OK to pivot a little bit to your second company, Melanin and Medicine? think like and I mentioned this at the very beginning of our recording, but like at least this is my experience. And so I'd love to hear your experience. And like if you have examples of like people that you've worked with with this company or groups that you've worked with at this company. But my experience is working in federally qualified health centers under resourced. It's really Medicaid, primarily reimbursements.
And I would be given a schedule. I would see this number of patients. We would do billing and coding as accurately as possible. But there didn't seem to be a ton of difference between the different levels of complexity of a visit to how much money the company actually got back, the federally qualified health center got back. And so it was really a bit of a numbers game, where it was like you just saw as many patients as they could to keep the doors open and to pay the bills.
But on a higher level, I pay attention to the stuff because I'm nosy and curious about it. But they would give the annual presentation at the end of the year about the financials of the company. And it was like, oh, well, 70 % of our revenue actually comes from patient visits. And then 30 % comes from grant funding. And so they would apply a various number of people, whether they had a dedicated grant writer, which one of the clinics I worked in did, versus another clinic, which was just kind of like, well, if you want to do a project about improving HIV care,
and you're going to want to take four hours out of your week to do that, you need to get a grant to be able to pay your salary for those hours. Because otherwise, we can't pay you. We can't pay the bills without you seeing patients. So I guess that's just an example to set some context for people. And I'd love to hear, is that an experience that you've heard other places because you've worked with so many people? that, yeah. And then if you want to just talk about what you do with melanin in medicine related to those situations.
Yeah, mean, first of all, that was totally the same. It's not the same, right? So federally qualified health centers have a specific focus and mission. But in terms of academic health centers as well, the goal was like, if you're not teaching, if you're not seeing patients and you want to start this social care coordination program.
Speaker 1 (25:54.356)
Everything costs money.
go find the grant to do it and that's fine, you know? And so it got to a point where I had gotten so many grants to do inside of the institution that I was probably overfunded, but I was still seeing patients because my patients would have probably rioted if I wasn't in the clinic. But I think, you know, ultimately you are correct. That is pretty much we are in a system that
You
Speaker 2 (26:26.434)
It's a two tier system, sadly, right? A system that says that if you're low income, we don't have to give the providers the money that they, the organizations or the providers the money that they need to be able to truly serve you at the highest level. We just have to give enough and it's usually not even enough for the bare minimum. Which is the sad part. And so there are grants and for federally qualified health centers and there's a heightened reimbursement.
than let's say a private practice or a non federally qualified to help at least even that out a little bit, but it's still very much very small margins to really do exciting, innovative, impactful work that doesn't encroach on the time, which is so important in health care. so when we talk about now,
out my work around this was that as a BIPOC practice owner and getting confronted with all of this, you know, as you're doing, cause you're like, you have this dream and it's like, okay, we're going to do this and we're going to serve all of these people. And then you start looking at profit and loss statements and you start looking at financials and you're like, uh, we got to think about something different in order to make this go. And luckily,
because we had approached our care model in a way that was different from see patients get money, see patients get money and we have focused on contracts with nonprofits or collaborating with them to get grant dollars in to help with hires of people so that we wouldn't have to like take that out of our revenue. That allowed for us to be innovative in terms of
oh, these are other ways to keep cashflow going and to make sure that we could still serve people and have 30 minute, 45 minute, 60 minute visits with our patients because of that additional. So when we started experiencing that, I kind of was like, we should figure out how we make more of us in particular, able to do this. And the thought process for me in terms of guide pod practice owners,
Speaker 2 (28:52.59)
is really intentional in the fact that there was a study last year in JAMA that showed how important it was for black primary care physicians, but I allude, I kind of make that broad to pretty much clinicians in primary care and include mental health, I believe all of that is connected and under the same umbrella. But it showed that having a black
primary care for your physician reduced all cause mortality and morbidity in regionally and increased life expectancy. Not if that individual was your physician, but just them being in that area. And it was like, yes, this.
God.
Speaker 1 (29:42.828)
So many chills, my gosh.
We know that had not been put on paper, but what we know and the issue for me was that a lot of BIPOC practices, you know, were having diffused with cash though, because the focus was on under-resourced communities, but it was really difficult to figure out how to continue to take care of these families with really low reimbursement. And so my thought process was we were doing a bit better in that.
and able to sustain and these contract relationships and grants were a really important part of that. So the goal was how do I standardize like and teach how to develop relationships with nonprofits locally and figure out ways that you can create connections that identify what are the needs of the communities that you both serve and what is the capacity for them to be able to
afford either bringing you on as a contract, as a subcontractor or joint or finding grants to bring you into their, to bring your healthcare services into their organization and the communities they serve. And so that's what we do at Mellon and Medicine. We identify BIPAC practice owners. We have had some non-BIPAC practice owners on a case by case basis, depending on like the, what their,
what the makeup of their practices and who they're serving and all of that. But majority it's been BIPOC practice owners. And what we do is we help to identify, we learn what the vision is that has not either been manifested because of financial issues. And then we identify who are the organizations that would be the right partners for them. And then we help them with making those connections.
Speaker 2 (31:32.256)
and putting together what the offers could look like that either that nonprofit partner could transition for a grant or that nonprofit partner could say, you know what, we can contract you to do this. And we help them make those, get those contracts. And so that's looked like, you know, for one of our organizations, that's looked like them, a mental health organization working with organizations that serves resident youth who are unhoused and being able to bring their mental health services.
directly into that organization. So now those youth have access to wellness support groups. It's looked like one of the other ones that we had is another one who's working with a YWCA and being able and who serves sexual assault victims and being able to bring their OBGYN services finally to them with this practice who is led by a practitioner who has done sexual assault
violence, you know, I'm sorry, has done OBGYN, for yes, for sexually assault, sexual assault victims, and also has a really good depth of how to provide ongoing guide care in a way that's responsive to that trauma, right? And so that's the kind of connections where we just help to facilitate those and then allow for the organizations to figure out on their own.
Can we do this by pursuing a grant or can we do this through a contract and being able to bring those funds in so that organization can bring their healthcare services closer to the community and the community and the community-based organization can now really have a holistic full scale, full scope of services for the families that they serve.
I love that. my gosh. You're just so special. You're such a special person and like, I just feel like the world is a better place that you're here and like you get to talk to all these people on this podcast. I just like feel so emotional. Thank you so much. This is so cool.
Speaker 2 (33:39.818)
Thank you. I think we're working. think well, I think all of us are working progress. I like that day to day, especially if you ask my two daughters that special.
Isn't that the worst? Your own kids are just like, yep. Yeah, okay, whatever.
Exactly.
gosh. Well, this is so, so cool. Are there other things that you want to share to the new nurse practitioners, experienced nurse practitioners, physician associates, physician associate students? I don't think I have a ton of physicians that listen to the podcast, but maybe there are.
Oh, yeah, mean, actually, as a practice that currently is, we're currently recruiting actually, we're trying to hire a family that's practicing. So, you know, let me put that out there if you're in New York. But I think ultimately as a practice, I was going to say that it has a diversity of commissions, right, including, you know, as I said, trying to, we have a nurse practitioner on staff, but also mental health.
Speaker 1 (34:31.165)
Ooh, amazing.
Speaker 2 (34:50.518)
you know, social workers, care managers, all sorts of things. think what's really important about how we move forward in healthcare for me as a physician, which is why when I talk about melanomedicine, it's very, very clear. I'm not talking about BIPOC physicians. I'm very clear about that. BIPOC clinicians, because I feel like we need all hands on deck. I feel like we all have these different experiences.
you know, especially nurses in particular, a very different experience from us as physicians in terms of, I would assume how they approach care as well, just given kind of the intimacy of the training and the work that you do before you become nurse practitioners. And I just feel like we need all of that to truly provide like equitable care that is responses. So,
In my head, I'm always thinking about, New York has been able to be more lenient now in allowing nurse practitioners to be able to practice on their own. And I'm excited about that, but I'm also excited about the partnerships. And I just think we have to think about how do we become more interprofessional, right? I think there's a lot of.
You can't do this. I can do this or who can do this? And I'm just hoping that even just being on your podcast and allowing for me to be able to be here as a non nurse practitioner.
Totally!
Speaker 2 (36:23.444)
I just want to really make sure that we're thinking about looking, I think it's important to look at who's doing the work that you're doing and not focusing so much on what their degree is, but just on what they're manifesting and being open to having conversations about how they're doing that, especially if it's aligned with your vision. I just want to make sure we reduce those silos.
Absolutely. think healthcare bleeds in a really negative way.
Absolutely. Yeah. And that's one of the things I just, get so excited about with this podcast is bringing on guests like yourself or like other specialties or, you know, other disciplines. Like it's just, I think that's, I think we can, I think sometimes it can feel overwhelming when we think about the challenges of the healthcare system as a whole. And it can be easy to get discouraged. I don't know, at least for me, I have to, I have to work myself up about it sometimes, but I feel like we just, we do have so much agency when it comes to those interpersonal.
relationships with people. we can have impact on a larger system when we come together and work together on what we're all trying to get going. I wonder if there's anything you recommend. think that I'm just kind of tapping into like the, there are people who want to see more true community health and not just, I work in a federally qualified, and I just give that example because that's my experience, but.
I've heard a lot of people say like, I like, really actually want this to be more of like a community care and not just, you know, my regular day to day seeing patients or like, I would love to like, if they're just feeling called forward in terms of what, what next steps, like where would you kind of recommend, whether it's following on with your stuff or other organizations or I don't know, any thoughts on that?
Speaker 2 (38:13.976)
Yeah, total many thoughts. And definitely feel free for your listeners to connect with me on LinkedIn. That's like the last social media place where I actually show up.
Yeah, no, it's true. I pulled back quite a bit. Yes. But LinkedIn I would like to re-engage with. Because I think it's so nice to have a connection.
to connect with me about that. I think, and I think I actually have some resources on my LinkedIn featured section that might be helpful for people. I think in terms of community, for me, it was to be humble. And I'm going to start like that's the thing like I feel like, you know, healthcare and especially for us physicians, it positions us as
It actually trains us to be kind of these patriarchal savior people. we're like, we're human too. And it puts all of that on us. And I think it does not. it almost value says that our professional expertise is more valuable than the expertise that communities already have about their, of their needs. And so what I usually say is.
Sorry.
Speaker 2 (39:30.594)
Figure out who you want to serve, figure out where the need is and figure out who is in any way touching that.
And who's already doing stuff. Yeah, you don't have to reinvent it.
that and that was kind of, you know, how we started where it was like the way I connected with my community partner who eventually became our first site child center of New York and Queens was we noticed when we were trying to address social needs and other things, we didn't have the capacity inside of the organization. And so we kept referring and then we realized we kept referring to this one organization because they had so many service connections. the thought was,
we should go meet this organization and the people who are there and just get out of the clinic and just go figure out who these amazing people are. And I think it starts with being humble and then getting out of the four walls of your clinical work and just finding who is that? Don't have to find 800 organizations. Who's the one organization that you're like, what they're doing is really cool. And I'm inspired by it.
what are the issues that they have right now and could there be any way that I could be helpful? And so going in not with an agenda, but discovery with a lens of discovery. And I think that's how the best partnerships are born.
Speaker 1 (40:55.608)
Beautiful. I love that. like the getting out of the four walls, the humility. I think that also reminds me too of like, especially when I was a newer clinician is like just that connectedness of being with, excuse me, like even like I would see the names of the physicians that we would be referring to in a specialty. And like we had very specific places we could refer because of the Medicaid insurance situation. And so it's like, yeah, I just like, it just reminds me of that curiosity too is like,
You know, can you, it's, I know that people get so bogged down in terms of the workload of primary care and it feels like, my gosh, this like extra thing. But like those connections, those community partnerships, those like, you know, seeing what else is out there and being all connected, like we can work better together and that will really, I just feel like it'll really lighten the load if we can take those initiatives.
it well. And I also feel like what people don't tap into is the new learners and the new generation, because the way we were able to do a lot of the work that we did when I was still at my prior institution was by tapping into our local public health school. And, and it was just amazing one because they actually needed and wanted to be able to do this kind of innovative work. But then also,
it was this other lens of being able to help the new generation see how they could provide care in a completely different way. So just tapping into not only the communities, but also thinking about the learners of health and what are the potential opportunities there to help support you. Because all I know is that team is completely...
necessary and a lot of us, medicine doesn't teach us that. Yeah. So just remembering that as well is going to be really important.
Speaker 1 (42:47.342)
100 % no.
Speaker 1 (42:52.878)
I love that. Well, thank you so much. So it sounds like we can find you on LinkedIn and those will be in the show notes. Any other places you want to refer people to like your website or Instagram or something like that.
Yeah, so our website for melanin medicine, if you're a BIPOC practice owner and you're kind of like, need more cash flow, that is melanin and medicine. So andmedicine.co. And then for our practice, if you want to learn more, especially if you're a family nurse practitioner based in New York.
We'll plug in there. mean, people you will get the people I promise. Yes, go ahead.
and like the work that we're doing you can go to strongchildrenwellness.com
So good. You're the best. Thank you so, so, so much. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (43:40.066)
Thank you. This was such a pleasure. It's very cathartic speaking with you Liz. So keep doing what you're doing. I know podcasting is not easy, but.
I love it. I would do it all day, honestly. It's just shop talk all day. My favorite thing.
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