Things have been picking up a bit over the past two weeks! I’m happy to be in a more involved place with the internship, and I was especially happy to realize that a lot of the skills I exercised this week related back to my research experience last summer and the academic year. This included developing materials to support the pilot, making recruitment posters via Canva, and discussing cost-savings research.
While some of the work has been familiar, a lot of it has been new as well. This included being trained on and testing a new platform: PtRefs. I was trained on this platform, Cayuga Health guidelines, and HIPAA over zoom with the other student navigators and my mentors. We learned about the context behind the work of Cayuga Health Partners, various HIPAA violations that may take place, and what to avoid sharing when interacting with patients.
The PtRefs training was a bit more confusing, as it’s a web platform I’ve never navigated before, but we were given testing sites to practice and familiarize ourselves with. This is essentially the main platform for all incoming patient referrals, student referral assignments, and patient document attachments.
Student navigators will be able to see what patients check as social needs on the screening form (ex. childcare, food, transportation) before calls are made via this platform and, after calling, send direct patient referrals to medical providers (pictured below). I will be responsible for consistently checking this platform for any incoming calls and assigning them to navigators when necessary. Calls will be made via another platform, MAHA, where all students can access and call patients from a shared phone number for patient familiarity.
I also met with Grace and Jen for a check-in on Tuesday. It was a really productive and good meeting, where we made more clear immediate and long-term goals for this internship. We discussed a few immediate documents that were necessary, including a sample call schedule based off navigator abilities. This was a bit more difficult to create than I thought, since we had to consider limited student availabilities, limited Friday/weekend evening hours, and a somewhat even distribution of hours throughout the week per student. After some feedback, I ended up simplifying it to 3 hour morning and evening chunks on weekdays.
We also discussed potential deliverables for this summer, including a literature review of medical cost savings based on meeting social needs (to justify investment), needed policy recommendations, and a toolkit for how other communities/college towns can implement a similar program. As someone with interest in health administration, I’m really excited to work on this research and learn more about different community health programs that have taken place. I find the medical savings side of preventative health especially fascinating (I’ve developed an ROI model on medical technologies and loved it), so I’m looking forward to doing this deep-dive. Another “deliverable” was the development of social media or other outreach materials to recruit future students. I’m also very excited about this, and I’m already thinking about potentially interviewing student navigators on their program experiences.
Another need mentioned was for supplementary OB-GYN office materials. Below are some Canva quarter card designs I’ve been working on–these are meant for midwives to have to inform about how the program works. I’m also working on developing a poster about social needs to be displayed in the OB-GYN waiting/exam rooms.
I’ve also been working on a student navigator shift checklist/workflow to detail tasks for students to take. This included more details on follow-up calls and tasks to keep in mind. Although it seems like a lot of information at first, I’ve made a few of these in my research lab during the academic year, and it’s always something that comes in handy just until students get more familiar with the tasks at hand.
I’m very excited for this upcoming launch week, as calls should be coming in! Other than tracking incoming referrals, my goals next week are to develop the program’s social media, finish designing office and student recruitment materials, and create a formal curriculum guide (detailing what parts of training have and haven’t went well) for this program.