Presenters
- Ciara Incorvati, MA, Graduate Student Behavioral Health Consultant, HealthSource of Ohio, Loveland, OH
- Michael Bruner, PsyD, PCBH Program Manager, HealthSource of Ohio, Loveland, OH
- Holly Binnig, MD, Chief Medical Officer, HealthSource of Ohio, Loveland, OH
Summary
It is no secret that frontline healthcare workers across disciplines are experiencing unprecedented levels of compassion fatigue and burnout. Similarly, the US population at large is struggling with significant levels of stress on multiple fronts. Technology is being utilized in new and creative ways over the past few years to increase access to healthcare resources and otherwise address these problems. In this session, we will present a project HealthSource of Ohio’s BHC team developed to promote wellness across our organization electronically. HealthSource is a large FQHC, serving 60k+ unique patients per year across 8 primarily rural counties, with a small BH workforce. This, together with increased demand for behavioral health services among our patient population, has made our BHCs’ attempts to provide in-person, site-by-site education and support to our co-workers challenging at best. In addition, it occurred to our BHC team that such efforts excluded our non-clinical staff (e.g., call center staff) who we knew also to be experiencing significantly increased stress. Furthermore, we have heard consistently from our medical colleagues and support staff that it is important that any wellness resources or activities not feel like “one more thing” they must do in their already-overloaded lives. HealthSource makes frequent use of various technological platforms for organization-wide communication, so we decided to leverage these existing pathways to broadly disseminate wellness content in small doses. Thus, HSO’s weekly “Wellness Nugget” – a brief, informal self-help video – began. Early into this project, HealthSource began to make a concerted effort to build our online presence across multiple social media platforms. In an effort to maximize the value of both our online presence and the wellness content we were already producing, we began to post Wellness Nuggets online for community access as well. We will describe this project in detail, showcase a Wellness Nugget, and present descriptive data regarding views and other analytics as well as both spontaneous and formally-requested feedback from HSO providers, staff, and patients.
Objectives
- Define and discuss compassion fatigue and burnout in the context of a federally-qualified health center (FQHC).
- Discuss how the use of social media and other forms of technology can be leveraged to increase knowledge about wellness within a healthcare system.
- Describe HealthSource of Ohio's "Wellness Nuggets", one example of such a use of technology.
