Workforce Solutions Jam | Enhancing Clinical Practice Through Technology
Tuesday, November 17, 2026 | 10:00 am PT / 11:00 am MT / 12:00 pm CT / 1:00 pm ET
Event Length: One Hour
This webinar is hosted as a partnership between the College for Behavioral Health Leadership (CBHL), The National Council for Mental Wellbeing, and Health Management Associates (HMA).
Webinar description: Behavioral health organizations are being asked to do more with fewer clinicians, even as demand for services continues to grow. Hiring alone won’t close that gap. Technology, when tied to clinical practice rather than layered on top of it, offers a way to extend the reach of the workforce, support clinicians in delivering high-quality care, and bring services to people who are not being reached today.
This session brings together voices who develop evidence-based approaches and those who put them into practice. Panelists will share how technology is being leveraged in clinical settings to deliver evidence-based care, support a broader range of providers, and reach populations that traditional service models often miss. The conversation will focus on how these tools fit within existing models of care, how they affect clinician roles and experience, and what leaders should weigh before investing. Attendees will leave with practical considerations and questions they can bring back to their own organizations.
Learning Objectives:
- Discuss how technology-enabled clinical innovations can address behavioral health workforce shortages and expand access to care.
- Explore how technology can support the delivery of evidence-based clinical approaches, including who it can help deliver care and the populations it can reach.
- Identify key implementation factors, such as workflow integration, clinician buy-in, training, and fit with existing care models, drawn from organizations using technology in clinical settings.
Audience: We welcome all who are interested in technology and digital solutions. The material is primarily structured to provide maximum value to Behavioral health executives, clinical and program directors, workforce and training leaders, and innovation or technology staff.
Meet the Speakers
Jason Hutchinson has six years of experience in solution architecture, software development, and technical strategy. Prior to joining the Meadows Institute, Jason was a lead developer at Genpact, a global professional services and technology firm specializing in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven business transformation. In this role, Jason architected and implemented enterprise solutions to solve complex business needs, co-founded the AI enablement function promoting the safe and efficient use of AI across business workflows, and partnered with stakeholders to define the technical infrastructure and governance needed to support data-driven decision making.
Chris Thompson is the founder of Sober Sidekick and Chief Executive Officer of Empathy Health Technologies, where he leads efforts to reimagine addiction recovery through connection, technology, and compassion. Since launching Sober Sidekick in March 2019, he has grown it into the world’s largest digital recovery app, with over 1.5 million downloads. The app uses an innovative empathy algorithm to provide real-time peer support, 24/7 access to virtual 12-step meetings, a sobriety tracker, and relapse prediction tools that empower individuals on their recovery journeys.
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Beyond the app, Empathy Health Technologies focuses on delivering care to underserved and hard-to-reach populations through partnerships with leading health plans and government agencies. Its end-to-end platform simplifies access to care by combining multi-channel member engagement, fast telehealth access, personalized care navigation, and real-time outcomes tracking. This approach eliminates barriers, ensures timely referrals across medical and social services, and streamlines vendor coordination to reduce administrative costs while supporting value-based care goals.
Chris’s leadership reflects a deep personal understanding of addiction recovery, driving a mission that prioritizes compassionate connection over profits. Under his guidance, Empathy Health Technologies and Sober Sidekick completed pilots with major insurance providers and earned recognition in the healthcare community for their impact. He remains focused on scaling the greatest wave of comeback stories, delivering measurable impact at scale through empathy, technology, and human connection.
Stephanie Skavenski van Wyk, MSW, MPH,
Stephanie is Clinical Director at CETA Global and a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is a co-developer of the Common Elements Treatment Approach (CETA), an evidence-based, transdiagnostic system of care that lets licensed clinicians and trained paraprofessionals treat depression, anxiety, trauma and substance use in one integrated plan. At CETA Global she leads the clinical side of the organization’s technology. This includes CareConfidence, which supports measurement-based care, treatment planning and supervision, and EBT-Sim, an AI-powered training simulator built with Google.org support. Her focus is making sure these tools strengthen clinical practice rather than add to it. She spent 10 years living and working in Zambia, including as Country Director for Johns Hopkins, and has led training and implementation in more than 20 countries and in community behavioral health systems across the U.S.
Background
The Workforce Solutions Jam is a monthly webinar to build national momentum and encourage collaboration through the Workforce Solutions Partnership. The partnership is leveraging Collective Impact to address the workforce crisis, and using a cross-sector approach to address the long-standing challenges for expanding and solidifying the behavioral health workforce.
The Workforce Solutions Partnership is the name for the partnership between the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, Health Management Associates and the College for Behavioral Health Leadership. The Center for Workforce Solutions continues to operate as an initiative of the National Council.