CEO | Fourth Street Clinic

What are you most looking forward to accomplishing in 2024?

What excites me about 2024 is starting to see all the hard work put into planning, program design and hiring broaden the impact of our work throughout the community. We launched so many new programs in 2023—behavioral health in permanent supportive housing, medical outreach in our resource centers, a student-run clinic with the University of Utah School of Medicine, and a program to provide transitional housing and recuperative care to individuals who are aging and medically frail. The amount of planning, community collaboration, training and resources we have invested in these services has been intense. I finally feel like these programs are ready to take full flight.

How do you define success for yourself and your company?

We work with individuals in crisis who have complex, co-occurring health care needs that, for the best of us, could take months or years to see “improvement.” We monitor clinical quality measures, wait times and patient satisfaction to ensure we are impacting health, but we mostly define success in terms of human experience. We saw over a hundred people today who, without us, would not have received the care they needed. Our incredible staff works hard to stay focused on the areas where we can have an impact.

Connect with Janida Emerson on LinkedIn.