I have spent the last 6 years navigating the healthcare system as a full time patient advocate for my own healthcare. As a woman of color with multiple invisible, underdiagnosed and poorly understood chronic health conditions, I know firsthand how difficult it is to navigate a broken healthcare system that it is not built for patients with complex chronic illnesses. It is only because I grew up in a large medical community that I taught myself how to navigate my insurance benefits, appeal processes, apply for clinical trials, and obtain access to the top specialists, diagnostic testing and treatments available for my conditions, amongst many other hard fought battles. I grew up with relative privilege and high medical literacy, and still have found it challenging and exhausting to have to constantly advocate for myself even when feeling at my worst — there’s been many times when I’ve wished I had the benefit of a professional healthcare advocate to provide this supporting role for me. Ironically, when I tried to hire my own advocate, they all told me I already was doing their job for them and should consider being a professional patient advocate myself! So here I am, eager to use my own knowledge and experiences to help other patients in similar situations — particularly those with autoimmune, neurological, and / or complex pain conditions get access to the care they deserve.

I have a PhD in Social Psychology and several years of consulting experience on health equity issues, including improving physician-patient communication, trust-building, etc. I am very detail-oriented and comfortable with reading and summarizing clinical research developments in lay terms for clients to help them better understand their conditions and track the latest treatments, clinical trials, etc. available. I can help you navigate your insurance benefits, and help you prepare material for and win your prior auth, appeals and external reviews for treatments typically hard to get insurance coverage for.

In our first call, I will give a brief introduction of myself and the ways in which I may be helpful to you on your patient journey. It will be an opportunity for you to tell me about yourself what obstacles you’ve been facing, and what you need help with. With your input, I will propose a plan for how I can best help you achieve your goals, and we will move forward to signing a contract if you chose to continue.

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