Cautious Hope for Environmental Activism

Colonial Beach, VA, in the Chesapeake Bay - Photo: Marguerite Gallorini

How can the environmental community unite to make a difference at the grassroots level?  Answering that question was the goal of the Annual Choose Clean Water Coalition Conference, which convened Wednesday and Thursday in Charlottesville.  And as WMRA’s Marguerite Gallorini reports, participants regarded past successes as a guide for the future of environmental activism.

Listen

Listening...

3:30

The 8th annual Choose Clean Water Coalition Conference met in Charlottesville for the first time.  Chante Coleman is the director of the coalition, which is made up of 225 non-profit organizations.  She explains the purpose and content of the conference:

CHANTE COLEMAN: This conference is targeted for our coalition members to come and learn about Charlottesville and learn about some of the water quality issues happening here… we go out on field trips and try to see more of the community.

Among the topics of discussion – what the coalition says is real progress in recent years in cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay, and how that progress is now threatened.  The conference featured presentations from around the Bay’s watershed focused on agriculture, communications, collaboration between local communities, climate change, social justice, and inclusion.  That included an update on a new federally coordinated strategy to restore and protect the Bay. It was generated by a 2010 executive order signed by President Obama that ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to set pollution limits on nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment pollution in the Bay.

COLEMAN: It's the biggest cleanup of the history of the United States, which is really exciting, and it's been working. We have measured success: The Bay grasses, the blue crabs, the oysters, the rockfish: they're all coming back.

Rich Batuik is the Associate Director for Science, Analysis, and Implementation at the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program Office. Together with Beth McGee, Director of Science and Agricultural Policy at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, he presented an optimistic, yet realistic, mid-point assessment on the program – set to end in 2025. He started with the restoration of underwater grasses:

RICH BATUIK: When we started as a partnership, we were just around 34 thousand acres. We have tripled that, we are close to 100 thousand acres. We've hit and actually exceeded the goal that we set about 15 years. This isn't a weather event, this is at bottom hard work by farmers and municipalities and homeowners out there.

He was also the bearer of good news for nitrogen reduction:

BATUIK: Over the last 30 years we shrank it by 66 million pounds delivered into the Chesapeake. That is a lot of reduction of pollution out there as well. That was the easy part. That was 30 years in the making. What do we have for the next 10? We still have got about another 50 million pounds to go. Are we done? Absolutely not. But are we making progress? Definitely.

BETH MCGEE: Let's get the message out: this is working! The science is working, the Bay is responding. It's working at the Bay level but you know what, it's also working at the local level.

But further progress may become more difficult.  In March, the Trump administration released its spending plan for the 2018 budget year, which would reduce the EPA’s budget by 31% – and completely eliminate the $73 million allotted to the Chesapeake Bay restoration program.

Beth McGee says the fight is not lost:

MCGEE: Congress calls the budget and so we have groups from across the watershed who are reaching out to their congressional members, through this network, to say "funding for this program is important, please restore it.”

And, as James River Association CEO Bill Street says, that advocacy works.

BILL STREET: As we've seen, as we've talked to members of Congress throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed and the representatives that cover those areas, there is strong support for continuing this program.

Coalition members say that if fully implemented, the ongoing cleanup will ensure "fishable, swimmable" waters – helping to fulfill one promise set in motion by the Clean Water Act 45 years ago.

This story appeared on WMRA.org.
Download it on Through Gallo Eyes Media.

Can This Student App Save Hospitals Some Time?

Clinician / Max Pixel Pictures / CC0 Public Domain

Patients waiting for hours, doctors delayed, missing patient files ... These are common health care scenarios that could be improved with a better communication system. WMRA’s Marguerite Gallorini talked to three business students at UVa about their new app, Tandem Medical, designed to solve these problems.

Listen

Listening...

3:50

PATIENT VISITOR: Well, it took you long enough, we’ve been waiting here for…

HOUSE: Mr Adams. Would you step outside for a moment?

PATIENT VISITOR: Why?

HOUSE: Because you irritate me.

That’s an extract from the TV show House M. D., but the amount of time patients often spend in the waiting room is an almost universal source of irritation -- for doctors as well as patients. One of the causes?  Inefficient internal communication in the health care industry – between doctors, lab technicians, and so on.

Tandem Medical is a student start-up aimed at tackling this issue. Kamran Pirasteh is one of the three students at the UVa McIntire Business School who created it.

KAMRAN PIRASTEH: You look at the communication system that hospitals use and it's the same in Europe, it's the same in Asia. It's basically a combination of in-person communication, and pager communication, and that's just so obsolete and it's really holding hospitals back. So providers, we found, have spent around 20 percent of their time just figuring out who they need to communicate with.

RIPLEY CARROLL: It's not only about efficiency, as Kamran mentioned, it's about quality and patient experience, and that's really important to keep in mind.

Fourth-year student Ripley Carroll deals with the sales and business development side of the app.

CARROLL: It actually significantly improves the care quality that these clinicians are able to provide, so improve quality scores which actually make these hospitals more popular under certain health care regulations, which is extremely important for them and really just kind of makes the whole system work better.

Their app has two key features, focused first on tasks, and second on the roles of various providers.  Pirasteh explains:

PIRASTEH: There are lists of tasks that people have and then once you've completed a task, you remove it from the list, you mark it as completed - it's like a cross between that and something sort of like GroupMe or Facebook Messenger, which allows users to communicate instantaneously with people in other departments to resolve tasks.

As for the role-based aspect of the system:

PIRASTEH: What we came up with was role-based communication: so we integrate with hospitals' scheduling systems to get messages to be based off their role. So if I have a message for the lab tech who is doing blood work, I just say "lab tech blood work: send" and it immediately ends up on that person's computer, mobile phone, and allows them to immediately communicate resolved tasks.

Over the summer last year, Kamran spent a couple of hundred hours observing the needs of health care providers in a hospital in Maryland.

PIRASTEH: Those doctors are actually on our team now, and they work with us to design and build the software, which we're going to deploy in their hospital within about 6 months.

James Wang, a third-year student at McIntire double-majoring in Business and Computer Science, joined the team a little later for the development of the app.

JAMES WANG:  We really got started building the product pretty much at the beginning of the year, like January. In about a couple of weeks, we had our first prototype, but since then, in four months, we've made a lot of progress. We're now completely HIPAA-compliant.

Which means they’re compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

WANG: Which means we're able to actually go into a hospital, and they can audit us for security breaches, stuff like that. We're still working on integrating with hospital databases - EMRs, Electronic Medical Records or EHRs, Electronical Health Records.

Eventually, this app has the potential to be deployed across the health care spectrum -- and it is designed for both desktop and mobile devices.

CARROLL: Essentially you could contact any clinician as a touch-point with a patient by simply clicking a few drop-down menus, and you don't have to know their name, you don't have to know their number; it really removes friction in the communication process, and can significantly improve outcomes for these patients and just make everyone's lives easier.

After this six-month trial, they are aiming to expand it to the 20 hospital systems their pilot hospital belongs to. It will be the initial step opening the gates for them to take this product down to the market, with a first focus on small to medium-size private hospitals.

PIRASTEH: I want this product in every hospital in the world, ideally.

So this trial in Maryland may determine whether this new idea from some students at UVa will be coming to a doctor’s office or hospital near you.

 This article appeared on WMRA.org