Here at The Health Collaborative (THC), we are fortunate to work with some of the most dedicated individuals working to making a difference in the lives of our community.
Among those individuals has been one of our interns, Eric Lang, a third year Xavier University Master of Health Services and Administration student.
For the past year, we were lucky enough to have Eric on our team as a CPC+/Practice Transformation Intern and as an AHC Support Intern. After a year working with the THC team, Eric is starting his residency at Health Source of Ohio (HSO).
Before Eric set out to start his year-long residency with HSO, we sat down with him to reflect on his accomplishments at THC and discuss how his experience will guide him through the rest of his career.
Q: Thanks for your time with us, Eric! Let’s start with the basics: How would you describe the work that THC does?
A: The Health Collaborative facilitates data-sharing, consulting, education, and health technology solutions among healthcare organizations and health systems with the goal of addressing equity challenges.
Q: Give us an overview of your role at THC and how you supported the team.
A: I worked as a Comprehensive Primary Care+ (CPC+)/Practice Transformation intern during the summer and fall, and now I work as an AHC Support Intern. In the CPC+ team, I worked with practice facilitators to create content for practice consultation meetings and plans, documented information into corresponding cloud-based data systems, and utilized CMS data to format summary reports of quality improvement measures. In my role as an AHC support intern I helped take meeting notes, coordinate communication, reviewed documents, distributed monthly AHC dashboards, and in general supported the team in any way that I could.
“The things I’ve learned in my roles at THC could fill pages… Beyond educating me on healthcare, THC taught me the importance of being in a supportive environment and in an organization that celebrates growth.”
Q: What have you learned through your role at THC and what do you hope to take with you to future roles and opportunities?
A: The things I’ve learned in my roles at THC could fill pages. Being new to healthcare before my program and my internship, I came in knowing almost nothing, but my internship experience at THC helped me experience so many aspects of healthcare. I gained knowledge on population health, quality improvement, government health initiatives and programs, data analytics, social determinants of health, and the list goes on.
THC played such an integral role in shaping not just my knowledge in healthcare and what I want to do in my future career, but also gave me the valuable perspective of working in an environment and organization that I truly enjoyed. Beyond educating me on healthcare, THC taught me the importance of being in a supportive environment and in an organization that celebrates growth.
Q: Tell us about your master’s program at Xavier and the residency that you will be starting as part of that program.
A: I am going into my third year of Xavier University’s Master of Health Services Administration (MHSA). The health services administration program is a three-to-four-year graduate program consisting of two years of coursework and one to two years of an administrative residency or fellowship, with an added emphasis on students completing an internship prior to the residency or fellowship. Xavier’s MHSA coursework covers many aspects of healthcare and administration such as management, finance, strategy, clinical processes, policy, ethics, and analytics. My administrative residency will be with Health Source of Ohio (HSO), a Federally Qualified Health Center. As a resident I will take on various projects that will expose me to different departments and leadership at HSO. My residency will be one year long and I’m very excited and honored to be chosen as their resident!
Q: And finally, do you have a favorite project or initiative that you have worked on here at THC?
A: This is hard because I enjoyed everything I did. Three projects stand out in terms of the autonomy I was given and the importance of the project. During my AHC internship I contributed to the health-related social needs gap analysis by updating sources used in the previous year’s gap analysis while also finding new sources based on current needs in the community that are different from last year’s. During my CPC+ internship, I had the opportunity to create a tool in excel for practice facilitators to easily pull easy to read data tables to send to practices and in another project, I had the opportunity to organize data that CMS archived for use in future initiatives.
I want to shoutout my supervisors from both teams Lauren Bartoszek, Jill Collet, Danielle Peereboom, and Elisa Perin as well as everyone I helped support on both teams Ben Dawson, Dawn Day, Michelle Doll, Ericson Imarenezor, Amanda Sebastian, and Marty Williams. I can’t talk about my amazing experience without giving credit to those who deserve it.
