Joan Brown, MBA, is the Telehealth & Program Technology Director at Orbis International and a 2014 GHDI graduate.

As someone working in technology, how has GHDI impacted your work?

GHDI has really changed the way I am able to contribute to conversations about program design in my organization. It widened my perspective, and I started looking at the demand and the value of the services that we provide to people.

When I attended GHDI, I was in the middle of market research for our tech platform, and I don’t know if I was asking the right questions. I got a lot of valuable perspectives from the field, but after taking GHDI, I changed our entire approach. We decided to start over with our technology platform design. I took the lessons from class and asked myself, ‘how are we applying this to the telehealth platform? How are we talking to people to make sure we understand the entire flow of care?’

We wanted to make our platform valuable for everyday use and easy to incorporate into our clinicians’ workflow. We looked at everything from generating demand to end user design. Before we redesigned it, our platform was focused on one-on-one relationships with people. Applying the value-based care framework from GHDI, we found that hospitals can leverage our platform to strengthen their health care system. They can create their own microcosm communities on our platform at no cost, and maximize the efficiency of their specialists. For example, they can connect a specialist in a tertiary care facility with a health care worker in a satellite office, using our platform as a referral pathway. We had never used our platform like that before. It wasn’t until I took GHDI and started thinking about things a little differently and talking to people in the field that these ideas came to fruition.