An Interview With EmpowerHealth
Cohort One Participant: Jemea Dorsey
Center for Black Women’s Wellness
What was the experience like for the Center at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic?
I guess it was like it was for everyone else – a complete stunner. ‘Pivot’ has kind of been my word
throughout this whole process – I probably used the word ‘pivot’ in March more than any other time in my
life! Initially, our first phase was really just looking at our clinical procedures and making sure that we had
enhanced patient safety procedures in place as it related to temperature checks and doing screenings over
the phone for risk factors or symptoms. It’s just like any other facility, but particularly in a clinic where
you’re already trying to modify plans to reduce exposure. Then, all of a sudden, we are in a city building,
and of course the city of Atlanta buildings closed around March 16th — so we had to pivot again and say,
“We can’t do in-person care, so how do we then make sure that we’re in communication with all of our
patients and make them understand that now we don’t have access to the building,? How can we be in
that COVID-19 mode?” We scrapped that and immediately went into Phase 2, which was really converting
everything into telephone encounters, and then rapidly researching for the planning and implementation
of telemedicine.
We already had been anticipating doing that – in our strategic plan, we probably put around September
2021 that we would be doing telehealth, so obviously we accelerated it. Around a month in, we
implemented a telehealth platform. We do women’s healthcare through paid staff, and then we do
primary care and chronic disease management through volunteer providers, so we’ve been really kind of
getting everybody up to speed. Right now I’m happy to say that around 13 of our 19 active volunteer
healthcare professionals are up and running, and they are actually still engaged with us even amidst the
pandemic. I always tell people that telemedicine is a wonderful strategy to compliment in-person services,
but to be used exclusively in the long term it’s not possible. We are, of course, unable to do pap tests and
clinical breast exams, and all that care that needs to happen within a clinical environment. But in terms of
the management of chronic diseases, being able to do those telehealth visits has become critically
important, so it’s a nice option to be able to still provide continuity of care, and to continue engaging our
volunteers, who – many of them – are of the demographic where they’re more susceptible to the virus
anyway, so that keeps our patients and our workforce safer by being able to do telemedicine and to be
within the safety and comforts of their home.
Do you think that any of your takeaways from your time in the EmpowerHealth program at Healthcare
Georgia Foundation might have helped you be more agile during this time?
With our EmpowerHealth grant, we were focused on having communications, fundraising, diversifying
funding and we had some strategies around the board. I think the key thing is that communications
already had to be at the forefront. When you’re doing remote work, you have to have communication
touchpoints. As an example, I’ve been communicating more frequently with the board about what’s going
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