The below is a republication of a story that featured DCRI’s Charlene Wong, MD, MSHP, which appeared in Duke University School of Medicine’s digital publication, Magnify.
When Duke’s Charlene Wong, MD, MSHP, initially decided to pursue a Master of Science in Health Policy Research, she hoped to one day draw on that experience to help improve health and health care. But she never expected that she’d be leveraging her skills to respond to the largest public health crisis of the 21st century.
An interest that initially began as work to remove barriers to complicated health insurance exchanges eventually led to a new role for Wong this past year—the Chief Health Policy Officer for COVID-19 for North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). Here, she helped lead COVID-19 response efforts, advising on everything from how to increase adoption of prevention measures like mask mandates to closures to mitigate the spread of the virus. She was also a member of the team at the helm of one of the largest public health campaigns that the department has ever undertaken: the effort to vaccinate as many people across the state as quickly and fairly as possible.
“I was honored and thrilled to have the opportunity to serve this state during a time when everything felt so uncertain,” Wong says. “In a way, knowing that I was doing something productive to hopefully alleviate the suffering in the pandemic and in the face of so much uncertainty helped keep me grounded and well.”
Read the rest at the Duke University School of Medicine’s digital publication, Magnify.