Introducing Haipeng (Mark) Zhang DO, MMSc, FAMIA, the Chief Officer for VHA's Office of Healthcare Innovation and Learning (OHIL).
Dr. Zhang was previously the Associate Chief Medical Information Officer of Digital Innovation and the Medical Director of the Digital Innovation Hub at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Associate Program Director of the Clinical Informatics and Innovation Fellowship at Mass General Brigham, Palliative Care consultant at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is the founder of Palliative Care Fast Facts for iOS and Android mobile applications, the co-founder of Cake, a venture backed company focused on advance care planning, and also founded and was the first president of American Medical Informatics Association Clinical Informatics Fellows (ACIF), the national organization for clinical informatics fellows. He also founded and is the president of the American Medical Extended Reality Association (AMXRA), the medical society for medical extended reality.
|
Preventing Veteran suicides is a top clinical priority for VA. That’s why VA launched the Mission Daybreak grand challenge in 2022, which awarded $20 million to suicide prevention solutions that meet the diverse needs of Veterans. Coming together as a community is critical to reducing Veteran suicides. Building off the work that began with the grand challenge, the Mission Daybreak movement brings together Veterans, researchers, technologists, advocates, healthcare providers, health innovators, and service members to accelerate promising innovations.
Through the Mission Daybreak movement, VA is collaborating with early-stage solutions for additional human-centered design and learning through the Greenhouse Initiative, and is also running direct pilots with more developed solutions. Suicide is a complex problem, with no single cause and no single solution. But it is preventable.
Mission Daybreak at the 2023 VHA Innovation Experience
From October 31 to November 2, Veterans, innovators, VA colleagues, industry leaders, and researchers gathered for the 2023 VHA Innovation Experience (iEX) to shape the future of Veteran care. Dr. Amanda Lineau joined Mission Daybreak winners—Sam Dorison from ReflexAI, Matthew Miclette from Neuroflow, and Casey Woods from the Overwatch Project—for a panel:
-
ReflexAI is an artificial intelligence-powered tool that can help the Veterans Crisis Line train and maintain a team of responders that can meet the needs of every Veteran who reaches out.
-
NeuroFlow is a two-sided technology platform that offers Veterans tailored resources and digital care 24/7 while measuring their evolving behavioral health needs to inform care teams of potential crises before they happen.
-
Overwatch Project is a peer-based intervention program that empowers Veterans to intervene with at-risk buddies, offering to temporarily hold onto their guns or take protective storage measures before it is too late.
The iEX panel talk kicked off with a video of Mission Daybreak subject matter experts and judges, who spoke about why suicide prevention matters to them.
|
Led by Dr. Lineau, the panel focused on the human impact of their solutions and the stories of the people who’ve gotten involved. From being able to work with the people most impacted to learning through collaboration with other teams, Mission Daybreak has helped innovators transform and scale their work. The panelists discussed how they are developing their solutions to meet both Veterans and clinicians where they are—whether that was by addressing how Veterans used programs or by meeting clinicians’ need for simulation training.
An important factor to both teams and Mission Daybreak subject matter experts is that solutions continuously improve, responding to the issues Veterans face each day. Panelists highlighted the need for ongoing feedback, as well as how new artificial intelligence and machine learning tools can better support iteration going forward.
Coming together as a community is critical to reducing Veteran suicides. Building off the work that began with the grand challenge, the Mission Daybreak movement brings Veterans, researchers, technologists, advocates, healthcare providers, health innovators, and service members together to collaborate and advance suicide prevention solutions.
|
Mission Daybreak in the 2023 VHA State of Innovation Report
Mission Daybreak was also featured in VHA Office of Healthcare Innovation and Learning's 2023 State of Innovation Report published last fall, featuring the multiyear movement to support the development of promising suicide prevention innovations. The report includes an update on VA’s support for program pilots and collaboration with promising challenge winners such as Televeda and BehaVR. Read more on page 71 of the report.
|
Mission Daybreak at HLTH 2023
At the HLTH 2023 conference in Las Vegas, several challenge winners — Dr. Risa Weisberg from BehaVR, David Black from Even Health, Christopher Molaro from NeuroFlow, Sam Dorison from ReflexAI, and Shruti Gurudanti from Televeda — presented their solutions to an audience of health innovation leaders. As part of the Mission Daybreak winner showcase, Dr. Amanda Lienau, Director of Open Innovation at the Veterans Health Administration, shared how our nation’s largest integrated healthcare system provided both funding and non-monetary resources — including synthetic data, research, mentorship, educational webinars, and partnership opportunities — to address VA’s top clinical priority and a top priority of the Biden-Harris Administration.
Suicide Prevention Resources
If you or someone you know are in crisis or have thoughts of suicide, contact the Suicide Prevention Lifeline for 24/7 support: Call 988 or chat online at 988Lifeline.org/chat.
If you’re a Veteran having thoughts of suicide or you know one who is, contact the Veterans Crisis Line 24/7/365 days a year: Dial 988 then press 1, chat online at VeteransCrisisLine.net/chat, or text to 838255.
 The Exchange is a monthly gathering hosted by the VHA Innovation Ecosystem and led each month by a different team of individuals who are disrupting existing models of care to build the future, using the principles and tools of innovation.
The Exchange is hosted the third Thursday of every month from 3-4 PM ET. In December, The Exchange hosted a panel of eight innovators who shared their tried methods and perspective on employee well-being, engagement, and happiness.
The panel began with Chad Franche, an Innovation Specialist at the Edward Hines, Jr. VA Hospital in Hines, IL. Franche believes that transformative ideas live in the minds of our frontline employees, and those ideas can be unlocked when supervisors and leadership create an environment where employees feel safe and empowered to develop those ideas. To do this, Franche said leaders must communicate the ‘why’ aspect of their mission to best motivate employees.
Candace McNulty is a Nurse Manager at the Orlando VA Health Care System who discussed her wellness management model that makes measuring employee wellness possible. She is the creator of "Fit a Bit of Wellness," a program that aims to promote employee wellness in the workplace through the innovative use of wearables, Whole Health and Holistic leadership. McNulty explained the benefits of creating opportunities for employees to connect, such as on-the-spot group activities that allow them to step away from the bedside and prioritize their wellness. McNulty's program demonstrated that consistent, incremental interventions over an extended period contribute to the overall success of improving front-line wellness.
Another panelist, Ronika Anderson, is an Employee Experience Design Strategist with VA's Veterans Experience Office and leads Human Centered Design sprints to improve the Employee Experience for VA team members. Anderson discussed her initiative identifying “moments that matter” such as identifying pain points and bright points at the VA. She found team members want to be asked how to be engaged with, i.e., spending time with managers, getting informal and formal feedback throughout the year.
Dr. Sabrina Clark, Director of VA's Center for Development & Civic Engagement (CDCE) (formerly known as VA Voluntary Services), was the final panelist rounding out the discussion. Clark discussed PERMA, a model framework for happiness and wellness based on positive psychology. Dr. Clark challenged listeners to resist the urge to say, ‘soft skills,’ recognizing the difficulty in dealing with other people’s emotions, purpose, and identifying their ‘why’ without framing it as a secondary skill. PERMA, Dr. Clark concludes, is about people becoming fresh and renewed.
Hear more in the panel recording from Barry Peterson, Ashley Rush, Dr. Jacquelyn Paykel, and Lori Murphy. Want to join The Exchange this month on Thursday, January 18th? Sign up here!
Note: this is viewable to VA employees only
 Last week, several VHA OHIL staff, including Matt Rowley, VHA IE's Community Builder, traveled to Nashville, TN, for the largest gathering of Student Veterans from across the nation, Student Veterans of America's National Conference (NatCon). At NatCon, OHIL hosted a healthcare innovation focused breakout session and booth, where we engaged with more than 300 student Veterans who were interested in learning more about innovation and how they can get involved at their local VA facility.
|
