The Mobile Outreach Clinic is honored to announce that our Program Operations Manager, Sherice Stewart has been awarded the UF College of Medicine 2020-2021 Superior Accomplishment Award in Category 1 – Clerical/Office Support. The Superior Accomplishment Award recognizes members of UF who have demonstrated commitment, innovation, and creativity as well as meritorious service that has helped to create an environment that makes UF a great place to be.
Sherice Stewart has always had long-term vision for the care of our underserved patient population. She has coordinated people of diverse backgrounds and interests to help contribute to a team that works together to improve the health and wellbeing of uninsured and underserved citizens of Alachua County, FL. In the past 10 years, Sherice Stewart has helped build the Mobile Outreach Clinic from the ground up and has founded trusting relationships with the community partners, other service providers, community leaders, our patient populations, local businesses etc. With her background in Compliance, Information Technology, and Program Administration, Sherice has created a homegrown electronic medical record that is user-friendly, HIPPA compliant, and easy to use for both medical providers and grant/data reporting. She manages day-to-day operations of MOC managers, inventory of clinic supplies, performs HR tasks related to staff and MOC personnel, manages IT issues related to the electronic medical record, oversees the budget, writes grants to help MOC remain financially sustainable, and manages volunteer providers at MOC, and so much more.
Additionally, Sherice’s work has allowed MOC to be a national model in the provision of healthcare for the poor and underserved and in professional student education in high-value medical care. The Mobile Outreach Clinic also houses a highly competitive care coordination program of undergraduate students, pre-health students, and interns for the Health Disparities Minor and Masters of Public Health programs which Sherice oversees. These students commit anywhere from several semesters to several years of volunteer work with MOC during which time they screen MOC patients for social determinants of health and then help address those determinants by linking underserved patients to local resources including job listings, affordable healthy food options, legal services, housing assistance and everything in between. Alongside our medical director, Dr. Grant Harrell, she has worked towards an improved curriculum within the College of Medicine for the care of the underserved. Subsequently, the impact of their work with MOC inspires many of these students to integrate public health and care for the underserved into their future careers.
Early on in her time at MOC, Sherice helped develop the Alachua County Safety Net collaborative which is a monthly meeting of all Safety Net providers locally, in an effort to share best practices and coordinate care for our community’s underserved citizens. Two years ago, Sherice helped developed a chronic disease self-management program called the “BESTYou” program which delivers free personalized health education to residents. In the first year, the program delivered health education to ~150 individuals in the community, several of whom achieved genuine life-changing health improvements through our 6 week workshop. Recently, she has quarterbacked leveraging the BESTYou program into what we are now developing as a Community Health Worker initiative for the county which she applied for and received certification from the State of Florida in order to have our program function as one of the few legitimate certifiers of CHW education in the state. Her efforts have also led to a working partnership with UF Professional Workforce development to train community members in East Gainesville as certified CHWs.
In November 2019, Sherice implemented and coordinated the Mobile Outreach Clinic’s first Grassroots Gala fundraiser which raised almost $30,000 from outside donors and honored local advocates who provided service to the greater Gainesville community. Shortly after this event, the MOC bus where we hold clinic suffered an unfortunate and unforeseen accident. Within less than a week of the bus accident, Sherice was able to connect with our community partners to allow us to continue full-time clinic services in brick and mortar settings.
In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic invariably impacted our day-to-day operations and presented numerous amount of challenges. Within three days, and through her efficient, productive, innovative, and service-oriented work, Sherice had bought a robust Telehealth infrastructure to us to continue to keep the Mobile Outreach Clinic open in order to provide chronic disease management to our patient populations in a remote and flexible format that works for our patients. By the end of March, 180 patients had been seen via Telehealth, and over 600 patients were seen via Telehealth from March 2020 – October 2020. The value of her work here is two-fold: the ability to see individuals via Telehealth keeps uninsured, low-income patient to the current disease on the medications and decreases unnecessary ER visits and hospitalizations of our patient population. At this time, we continue to utilize the Telehealth Infrastructure that Sherice has developed.
Sherice has and continues to support MOC in ways that go beyond her responsibilities, especially during the challenges we’ve faced during the pandemic in the past year. Her initiatives to ensure that we are delivering the highest level of quality to our patients have undoubtedly have led to the overall success of MOC. Please join us in congratulating Sherice for this much-deserved award!