Reflections and Goals for 2021 and Beyond

As 2020 wraps up, I wanted to share some highlights since starting this project and outline some of our goals and vision for the new year!

When we started AccessiHealth, our group had a clear sense of vision and purpose – to help patients in safety-net settings more effectively access, understand, and navigate their urologic care. While we’ve maintained this mission, this project has grown into something much bigger than we had envisioned. We were inspired to use the AccessiHealth project as a springboard to train and empower our next generation of healthcare leaders with tangible tools to solve unmet healthcare challenges.

With that in mind, Venezia put together an incredibly talented and passionate team of her high school classmates and peers. This group has risen to the challenge and is now independently spearheading the AccessiHealth project and leading the app-development component of this project. The group has made impressive progress and has conducted over 90 stakeholder interviews and has translated these insights into a simple app prototype designed to help patients record and track basic medical information. After conducting extensive interviews and researching the nuances and challenges treating various urologic conditions, the team has elected to focus their initial app proof-of-concept on Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (BPH). Specifically, we aim to create a simple tool to help improve health literacy around BPH and facilitate medical care (i.e. identifying potential red flags that warrant follow-up) to prevent BPH complications (i.e. Renal Failure) and outcome disparities that disproportionately arise in vulnerable patient populations. Our team is currently researching challenges and barriers to BPH care and brainstorming ideas and has set an ambitious goal to prototype a proof-of-concept BPH app in the coming months.

The project has additionally evolved into a full-fledged mentorship program and leadership pipeline. We wanted to use this project as a platform to help this incredible group of students brainstorm and carve out their own unique pathways for making a meaningful impact in STEM/Healthcare. So far, we’ve organized several interactive mentorship sessions with UCLA physicians, medical students, business school students including the following sessions:

- Justin Lee, MD/PhD Student/ Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow: “Finding Your Path and Creating Your Mission Statement”

- Andrea Araujo, MD student, UCSF Better Lab Fellow: “Human-Centered Design and Health: How to Tackle Unmet Healthcare Needs”

- Rosa Segura, UCLA MBA student: “Making an Impact in Healthcare: Opportunities in Industry and the Non-Profit Sectors”

- Kelly Fero, MD, UCLA Urology Resident: “Life as a Surgeon”

- Josh Berut, Founder/ Business Owner: “Making an Impact through Entrepreneurship”

We’re looking to continue to bring in a variety of speakers and are working on pairing students up with individual UCLA undergraduate mentors to help with college planning, as many of our team members wrap up college applications in the coming weeks and have some big decisions to make ahead! Desiree and I are also very much looking forward to putting together a virtual suturing workshop to give our group a little taste of what we love -- and hopefully inspire some future surgeons!

It’s been incredible to see the initiative, leadership, and drive from this group, and we are very much looking forward to making significant progress and headway in 2021!

- Abhi