Transforming Healthcare Through Creativity and Innovation: NHHA Welcomes Dr. Clayton Chau To The Team
NHHA (National Healthcare and Housing Advisors) has recently brought on Dr. Clayton Chau to serve as NHHA's Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer. Dr. Chau previously served as the former Health Care Agency Director and the County Health Officer for the County of Orange, California, the 6th largest county in the nation, during the pandemic from 2020 - 2023. During his tenure, he oversaw public health, mental health & recovery, environmental health, correctional health, employee health, public guardian and emergency medical services with over 2900 staff members and a budget of over $1 Billion.
Dr.Clayton Chau, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer
The addition of Dr. Chau to the NHHA team is pivotal to the work NHHA is doing to provide transformative change to vulnerable and marginalized populations, keeping health equity and diversity at the forefront. The NHHA approach focuses on bringing innovation, creativity, and different perspectives together to solve the biggest systemic issues facing healthcare.
Dr. Clayton Chau had the opportunity to sit down with Terry Campbell (COO of NHHA) and Paul Leon (CEO of NHHA) to discuss how they plan on working together to tackle some of healthcare’s biggest challenges.
To Dr.Chau, NHHA is a new and exciting opportunity to work with industry leaders to create creative solutions for healthcare and housing issues.
“After I retired, I started talking to Paul, met with Terry, and realized this opportunity with NHHA is amazing and allows us the freedom to achieve such a big goal and it’s exciting. Often in healthcare, industry professionals have been in it for years, but don’t know what’s happening outside of healthcare and medicine. Sometimes, the solution might be right in front of them in plain sight, but they may not see it from their perspective. This is why it’s important to have different perspectives in health care.
With NHHA, the power lies in our unique backgrounds and coming together to collectively find the right solution.
The primary issue within healthcare is that many think that this is the only way to do things simply because it’s always been done this way. They’re not open to different ideas and solutions, but all you have to do is be creative and apply that to healthcare.
What excites me with NHHA is we’re able to offer creative and innovative system solutions and not just one piece of the puzzle. It’s whole person care, it’s housing, it’s real estate, and it’s healthcare. When you’re talking about vulnerable populations, sometimes healthcare and their health is the last thing on their list. What is it that they need in their lives at this moment right now? It’s our job to make sure we fulfill their needs before we get to the healthcare issue.”
After Dr.Chau spoke about the benefits that NHHA offers being a private consulting firm, CEO Paul Leon added to the benefits of the NHHA team having both public and private sector expertise.
“90% of the nonprofits in the United States are under $100,000. They’re small local services providers and organizations and so isolated that it’s difficult for them to make a big impact. With NHHA, we’ve worked with and have a clear understanding of both the public and private sectors, how they function, and how they operate.
I’ve almost exclusively worked in private, so I understand how funding in private markets go. Running a for-profit and a nonprofit has very different dynamics. We’ve really integrated our executive team and our staff to take the best of both worlds and really enhance public and private partnerships.
We’re using private money connected to public roots to be able to make sustainable system changes. It’s all for naught unless you can really change a system. We can be doing this 20 years from now and everything will be the same unless we change the systemic issues, especially in healthcare. Healthcare is incredibly risk-averse and organized in a way where the methodologies won’t pick up on the nuances of a specific community, especially communities of color that have the biggest needs.
We’re seeing now the effects of not building and supplying access to health, education, food, or jobs. All of that is becoming a boiling point and mental health and homelessness are both synonymous where they’re indications and symptoms of a system that is really broken.”
Paul Leon, CEO
This idea of integrating the social determinants of health into the healthcare system is the basis of NHHA’s work. As Dr.Chau puts it:
“We’re at the pivotal point of our healthcare system where we really need to address equity. It’s because of the inequity that’s making healthcare cost us an arm and leg, and we still don’t have great outcomes. People only get cared for when they’re really really sick and by the time we bring them to healthcare, that’s a fixed cost.
Here’s one example. If you wait until someone develops severe diabetes, then you intervene and bring healthcare to them, by that time, they already need dialysis. You can’t fix that and it becomes a fixed cost now. Instead, you need to go upstream and provide that early prevention that would prevent them from progressing so fast and prevent the high cost of care.
The problem is they don’t get that because they’ve fallen to the vulnerable population (low income, aging, LGBTQIA+, and disabled) and you don’t pay attention to bring in the most effective care. In turn, you not only cost them their lives but it costs the system an exorbitant amount to care for them.”
To solve these systematic issues, Paul Leon reiterates the importance of NHHA’s outlook on public and private partnerships.
“People are starting to use terms like social and political drivers. In a society with immediate gratification, there’s not an immediate return on investment of these efforts and sometimes it can take years before you see any results. People don’t always have patience to allow the good work to actually get done. When we’re looking at financing and funding, there’s a real temptation to take a path of least resistance, which isn’t always the best route to actually solve systemic issues.
Service providers and nonprofits need to make sure they have enough funding in order to be able to do things that are foundational and actually move the needle. To do things like this, you need a pretty diverse team that’s integrated into the plan and the mission.”
Chief Operating Officer, Terry Campbell affirms NHHA’s bold strategy for building an exceptional team to tackle what some see as impossible.
Terry Campbell, COO
“To accomplish what we want to accomplish, we have to bring experts together in these different areas and leverage their strengths. I’ve always been a people person and believe in energy. We have to get people to come along and believe in the journey and I think these gentlemen are incredibly inspiring. In order for us to be successful, we have to get people to engage and understand the mission. If you don’t know where you’re going, then you end up nowhere.”
