The impact I hope to have
Just three months into her job, Katrina Chaffin’s work was making a true difference in Coloradans’ lives.
Before Katrina Chaffin earned her MHA, she remembers predicting how the degree would help her.
“I felt an MHA would advance my professional goals and career, and bring me one step closer to the change I want to create and the impact I hope to have,” Chaffin says.
But she could have never predicted how quickly those predictions would come to pass.
Just three months into her job as a program manager at Prime Health, a nonprofit that fights health disparities and inequities, the pandemic hit ushering with it a critical need for telehealth – digitally delivered medical services.
“I feel like I’m actually making a difference in healthcare at a systemic level.”
During her time in the MHA program, she worked full-time in telemedicine at HealthONE, and as fate would have it, during her residency, which she completed at Prime Health in the fall of 2019, Katrina focused on telehealth implementation and program design.
Suddenly, she was doing it – in the real world for a real purpose that would help real people. Her work made online visits possible for patients across Colorado so they could get quality care virtually.
“I feel like I’m actually making a difference in healthcare at a systemic level,” she says.
Today Katrina, who also teaches undergrads about health care organization and management, is now working to make quality telehealth a common tool for health care delivery in remote areas and throughout the state.
“I feel very fortunate to be part of the healthcare community because every day we’re doing our best to improve lives.”