-: 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.