PBN 2021 Innovative Companies Awards
Education: Integrative Healthcare Solutions Inc.
Since its creation in 2019, Integrative Healthcare Solutions Inc. and its founder have been feeling their way through the worlds of grant-seeking, partnerships and COVID-19 bombs to achieve a single goal: melding the best of Western and Eastern holistic medical practices for the benefit of patients.
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Founder and CEO Catherine DeOrsey worked her way into creating the 2-year-old West Greenwich-based nonprofit through some deep personal history. Her father had died of cancer. Her brother died of a drug overdose. DeOrsey was a trained physical therapist and had worked as a representative for a pharmaceutical company and had been prescribed a noneffective drug for Crohn’s disease, which she later recovered from on her own, drug-free terms.
All these experiences created a conviction in DeOrsey that Western medicine, with its emphasis on drugs and surgery, needed a dose of holistic medicine, which focuses on the whole person, mental wellness and diet.
“I am trying to accelerate the holistic side of health care to the front lines,” said DeOrsey, who fully respects the value of Western medicine. “Holistic health care and lifestyle management need to come to the forefront of treatment options.”
With a $50,000 state Opioid Response Grant and a medical group as a referrer, in mid-2019 Integrative Healthcare began offering education in pain management without opioids, including acupuncture, reiki and relaxation techniques. The six-month grant served 28 people and achieved some reduction in opioid use.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020 and all attention turned in that direction, DeOrsey pivoted to a partnership with A Wish Come True Inc., a Warwick organization that supports families with a child with a life-threatening illness. As a contractor for A Wish Come True, DeOrsey’s nonprofit began offering mental health care sessions for men, women and teenagers from these families.
Both projects – nonopioid pain alternatives and emotional aid to Wish families – continue through referrals. All treatment costs are covered by grants and fundraising, a new challenge that DeOrsey calls her next innovation.
