VP of Information Technology and Public Policy, Clarity Child Guidance Center

My name's Chris Bryant. I am the vice president for information technology and public policy at Clarity Child Guidance Center in San Antonio. Clarity is a children's only mental health facility. We do a wide range of mental health care from outpatient meds and therapy, crisis assessment, day treatment and inpatient acute care. I basically manage all of the IT, medical records and children's mental health public policy is probably the biggest chunk of what I do. I'm an call 24/7 with the IT piece, but the other part, which the policy, that's really important is with IT and the medical records and the data, that also comes with security and privacy and all those things that are HIPAA related, that's also a policy driver today. So they intertwine a lot more than you think that they would and it's not uncommon that while I'm working on insurance issues or licensing issues or anti-stigma issues, the technology piece is overlapping in that a lot today. The policy part of the work that I do is really advocating for our kids and their families, families that have children that have mental health issues or find themselves in a mental health crisis or emotional issues that are happening at school. We don't have a whole lot of family education around what they should do, what their next steps are. If you have a child that falls and breaks their arm or has an asthma attack, you know exactly what to do and you're gonna go to an ER. People that have children that have mental health issues sometimes really just don't know what to do. A big part of the work that we do, that I do is educate legislators and elected officials, because there's such a huge gap in access to care in mental health and much like families don't know how to navigate the system, the legislators don't even know what the system looks like and where those gaps and needs are. So I do a lot of education, talking to them. I sit on a lot of community advisory boards. In fact I'm currently sitting on one now in San Antonio and the state of Texas. We're revamping our state hospital system, so a lot of the communities are getting together and trying to figure out what that looks like; how best it'll serve our city, our community, our counties.