Unhooked: Tackling Opioid Addiction and Behavioral Health Conditions Through a Population Health Model

CHRIS POWELL grew up in an alcoholic household, where he experienced the trials and traumas of addiction firsthand. As an adult, he spent his career at the crossroads of healthcare and innovation. He has served as vice president and general manager of GE Healthcare, overseeing the company’s efforts in Canada and Central and South America. Chris then served as CEO of Precyse, a health information management and services company that covered medical coding, healthcare education, and a service-enabled technology platform to improve coding and workflow. Becoming CEO at Aspenti Health, Chris recognized the criticality of the work in the field and rallied investors to support a new vision: the application of a population health strategy to the treatment of substance use disorders (SUD). Leveraging a preexisting randomization platform used to support specimen collections and testing, Chris’s team created a novel digital service replete with a diagnostic module that supports test ordering and resulting, ICD-10 coding, community event engagement, and protocol management. He also promoted digital educational content development distributed across partner networks and a new population-health analytics program. This vision propelled the company to a new level and provided a powerful and effective service to providers in the region. JILL S. WARRINGTON has spent the past twenty-five years in healthcare. Beginning her career as a federally funded MD-PhD student, Jill bridged the clinical and research worlds, recognizing the critical nature of translational medicine and the value of applying research principles to clinical service work. With a PhD in pharmacology, Jill was exposed to the operations of pharmaceutical companies and the principles of laboratory medicine. Through her academic career, she has learned from some of the best at Princeton University, Tufts School of Medicine and Graduate Sciences, Duke University, and now the University of Vermont. Throughout her career, she has brought thought leadership to her endeavors, publishing pioneering research on innovations in SUD and spearheading a number of grant-funding projects in this area. Through her work with Chris at Aspenti Health, where she served as chief medical officer, she collaborated with institutions on bold new approaches to substance-use treatment, helping to introduce new reporting strategies for laboratory-result interpretation; providing countless local, regional, and national presentations; serving as course director for digital educational content development; and championing innovative solutions in the organization, such as the introduction of a transformative testing strategy―known as comprehensive screening―to the field. Further collaborations have involved the following: a mobile unit for specimen collections during the COVID-19 pandemic; the development of a telehealth strategy for observed collections (telecollections); Lean Six Sigma operational and quality efficacies to the laboratory; and the investigation of several offerings to the digital platform, including the incorporation of social determinants of health data and the collaborative helping model. Today she serves as Director of Population Health for the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Vermont College of Medicine and as Laboratory Director for the Vermont Department of Health Laboratory.