Blending Nursing and Business Education to Create a Different Type of Care Model

With advanced degrees in business and nursing, Maurice Brownlee, MSN’16, DBA, MBA, RN, CPHRM, FASHRM, CHC, blended his professional education to found Wellness Homes of Chicago in 2018, an initiative created to close the health disparity gap in Chicago by offering a different kind of care model. The wellness homes intentionally look more like actual homes than health care clinics, Brownlee said, and the word client is preferred over patient.

“I don’t have clinic chairs, I don’t have the traditional waiting rooms,” said Brownlee, who serves as the medical director and chief wellness officer. “My exam rooms are not traditional. It is, in fact, a home.”

As a nurse, Brownlee’s goal with his model is to provide excellent inclusive care and health education for people who might otherwise fall through the cracks of traditional health care services. The Wellness Home is open weekends and late evenings, to help people like essential workers who might have difficulty taking time off work. The model is also less stringent about appointment times. “If they’ve been on 12 different buses, and five trains to get to me, who am I to penalize them if they’re 15 minutes late?” Brownlee asks. “This model is meeting people where they are.”

As a businessperson, Brownlee wants to create a sustainable health care model that is appealing to people with private insurance as well. “This model is going to be so nice, because we will be able to attract patients who have great commercial insurance, as well as those who are a little bit less fortunate,” Brownlee said. “If you think about the mixed housing model, where you have low-income housing in moderate- to high-income housing, it’s the same philosophy. If you put these populations together, the population that’s more at risk will have access to better care.” A practicing nurse since 1995, Brownlee said he felt he was more suited toward administrative leadership, so he earned a master’s and doctorate in business administration. As director of a facility in Atlanta in 2011, Brownlee began to notice high numbers of young people coming into the practice with clinical HIV. “I was like, God, I can’t believe this. There just must be something that can be done about it,” he said, “but I didn’t have enough clinical knowledge about it to understand it.” Duke University School of Nursing (DUSON) offered the MSN HIV specialty certification program, and Brownlee eventually enrolled.

It was a tough two years for Brownlee, who suffered personal financial setbacks. Once he started classes however, and realized how rigorous and time-consuming earning the certificate would be, he needed to make some tough decisions. “I always earned all my degrees while I was working, so I automatically thought I could work, but I couldn’t,” Brownlee said. Despite how difficult his years at Duke where, Brownlee said his experience was invaluable. “The academics are great; that certainly prepared me,” he said. “But it was the clinical experience that prepared me more than anything. Those struggles, those clinical rotations, they provided me a life lesson, and they gave me what I needed to make it happen in the real world.”

The Wellness Homes of Chicago includes a 9,000-square-foot facility and offers behavioral health and community services, in addition to primary care, and offers outreach support and providers in senior residence communities. It recently introduced a cardiometabolic program. The group includes five advanced practice practitioners, three MDs and five behavioral health therapists. In addition to health care, Wellness Homes teaches adherence strategies and partners with an in-house pharmacist at one senior site to make it easier for clients to access prescriptions. While Brownlee was inspired by the young people with AIDS in Atlanta, the Wellness Homes he has built in Chicago go beyond that specific population to address the impact social determinants of health have on overall wellness.

“People are not dying of HIV, they’re dying of the other comorbidities that come with HIV. So, if you don’t address those other comorbidities, you’re not doing HIV medicine any justice,” Brownlee said. “Our initiative will always hinge on closing the disparity gap in whatever area of health care it is.”