Dr Kanayo Radcliff Okeke - Eweni

I am a Community Health & Medical Expert with a wealth of experience working in clinical and non-clinical settings and this includes organizations that foster increased healthcare access, provides relief for the sick, and carry out health interventions in communities with health disparities. I employ a patient-centered approach that entails empathy, communication, quality improvement as well as best practice knowledge and skills that ensures better patient outcomes. I am also passionate about contributing towards building an efficient, affordable, and reliable health care system in health deprived countries and communities.

As a Program Manager in the largest tertiary healthcare institution in New Orleans, I lead a robust team of Patient Navigators/Nurses, to provide compassionate care to all patients and together we successfully attained Hospital Wide Expansion of HIV & Hepatitis C testing within a 12-month period. Now working towards system-wide expansion of the program across 4 other large hospitals within the LCMC Health System.

My success with routinizing free Opt-out HIV/Hep C testing in the ED of UMC-New Orleans inspired doctors with Louisiana State Department – Office of Public Health to reach out to me as a Subject-matter expert to work with them on a tool kit that aims to provide guidance for Emergency Departments as well as clinics across the region to replicate the success recorded at UMC. Another important contribution I made to the Tool Kit was providing a multi-purpose tool that can serve as a checklist and can as well be used to implement a Need or Gap Analysis concurrently.

A hunger and openness to learning new things as well as taking corrections from anyone, and a discipline to ask the right questions, are the two key qualities that are helping me achieve my short and long-term goals. These include: continually improving my capacity to provide high quality holistic patient-centered care as well as smart innovations that’ll help optimize patients health status, reduce hospital visits and address health disparities.