Cura Personalis: Digital Approaches to Holistic Student Care

During COVID-19, Georgetown University leveraged Salesforce’s Health Cloud platform to rapidly roll out a host of supports for students, staff, and faculty, from contact tracing to vaccine management. Beyond the immediate crisis, the platform has generated competencies that pave the way for a long-term, holistic approach to student care through digital collaboration. The result is the ability to live out the GU core value of cura personalis, caring for the whole person in new ways. Using Health Cloud, GU was able to rally around the unique needs of students, faculty, staff, and contractors by providing high-quality wrap-around services. This digitized collaboration has opened new doors to address long-term pain points for student services: How do we enable collaboration across campus? Where are opportunities to automate student support? Can we digitize the experience using a branded app? Can we engage third-party contractors in a holistic approach to student care? Moving from disconnected providers to a coordinated effort, the project acted as an accelerator to bring together people and technology to better serve the community during an unprecedented time of need. Drawing on research across the United States and Canada, we highlight three ways that digital technology can support rapid collaboration between stakeholders: reconfiguration of existing technologies for new uses; leveraging virtual collaboration; and the power of analytics.