A gift from the couple Stuart McClure and Tusdi Vopat is establishing an endowed chair for integrative health at Rady Children\u2019s Health Orange County.<\/p>\n
The co-founder of Cylance Inc., the Irvine-based cybersecurity firm he sold for $1.5 billion, and his wife, president of the couple\u2019s Clavis Foundation, made a gift of an undisclosed amount to create the Clavis Foundation Chair for Wellness\u2014the first endowed chair in Rady\u2019s 62-year history. It will focus on integrative health encompassing everything from mental health to nutritional testing for the pediatric population.<\/p>\n
Vopat told the Business Journal that most mental health and wellness services are geared toward adults, with very little focus on \u201cpediatric integrative health.\u201d This new foundation aims to fill the \u201cgap in healthcare facilities.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think this (foundation) puts CHOC in a good position to provide something that nobody else is providing,\u201d said Vopat, referring to Children\u2019s Hospital of Orange County in Orange.
Dr. Michael Weiss was named the inaugural Clavis Foundation Chair for Wellness and plans to expand the hospital\u2019s existing wellness efforts, including the launch of an integrative medicine program.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe as physicians are very reactive. We\u2019re good at sitting in our offices and waiting for sick people to come and visit us, but that\u2019s not really the paradigm that we want to focus on,\u201d Weiss said at a Jan. 9 event announcing the gift and endowed chair. \u201cThis chair, this whole program, is about shifting the paradigm into proactivity and prevention.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whole-Person Care<\/p>\n
Vopat has been on the CHOC Foundation board for six years.<\/p>\n
Prior to joining the board, she was on its wellness committee.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe tried to get that going, but then that got deprioritized\u2014as it should have been, considering all of the other things that were very important at the time,\u201d Vopat said.<\/p>\n
Vopat said she\u2019s personally passionate about integrative medicine, which looks at health as a whole and focuses on wellness, prevention and lifestyle.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re all finding that mental health is really connected to our physical health, so you can\u2019t address one without the other,\u201d Vopat said.<\/p>\n
Once Vopat joined the board, she met Douglas Corbin, who was the chief development officer at CHOC Foundation at the time and \u201creally understood (her) passion,\u201d eventually developing what became the current program.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has changed a bit from the original vision, but I think it\u2019s better,\u201d Vopat said.
Vopat and McClure began conversations with Weiss about an endowed chair around four years ago.<\/p>\n
Weiss was a practicing pediatrician for 22 years before becoming vice president of population health at Rady. He also oversees the clinical program for CHOC Health Alliance, which provides care to more than 140,000 children across the region.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe couldn\u2019t have hand-picked a better person,\u201d McClure said.<\/p>\n
In his new inaugural chair position, Weiss will help address the root causes of illness while supporting proactive, preventive care, earlier intervention and improved access to a broad range of evidence-based care, including integrative medicine.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can be the healthiest county in America, but if we don\u2019t have productive members of society moving out of their childhood into adulthood, we\u2019ve failed, and that\u2019s what this is all about,\u201d Weiss said.<\/p>\n
Prevention is Key<\/p>\n
Vopat and McClure started the Clavis Foundation in 2020 to search for innovative ways to solve the most challenging problems in health, education and the environment through prevention.<\/p>\n
The idea for the foundation\u2019s name, which means \u2018key\u2019 in Latin, came about during a family trip.<\/p>\n
\u201cPrevention is the key and that\u2019s the name of the foundation,\u201d McClure said.
The Clavis Foundation has supported other initiatives at Rady, formerly known as CHOC, prior to the endowment gift. They made their first gift to the hospital during the pandemic to create a fund for impacted families.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat relief fund we put together for Rady addressed not just the healthcare costs, but more importantly, the general sort of living costs that occurred when parents were out of work or impacted negatively due to COVID and related illnesses for their children,\u201d Vopat said.<\/p>\n
Recipients of the fund included parents facing job losses or reductions in work hours, families at risk of eviction and households with newborns in need of medical services.
The fund provided up to $3,000 in direct financial support to more than 76 families, according to Rady.<\/p>\n
The Clavis Foundation also helped support Rady\u2019s WellSpace initiative, which launched in 2019.<\/p>\n
Rady partnered with the Orange County Department of Education and Design with Purpose, a Laguna Beach nonprofit, to create \u201csafe, dedicated areas in schools that support the mental and emotional health of students.\u201d<\/p>\n
The initiative aims to have a WellSpace in every school across Orange County\u2019s 28 districts.
Outside of its work with Rady, Vopat and McClure\u2019s family foundation is working with Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian on a nerve stimulator for gastrointestinal health.<\/p>\n
Music for Pediatric Mental Health<\/p>\n
Pediatric mental health is a big focus for Cylance founder Stuart McClure and his wife, Tusdi Vopat.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a healthcare issue that\u2019s growing in prevalence in and outside of Orange County.
Statistics show that 40% of high school students report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness with 22% seriously considering suicide, yet more than half of youth with major depression symptoms reportedly do not receive any mental health treatment.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why the couple\u2019s Clavis Foundation is involved with Laguna Beach nonprofit Omada Foundation for Children, which is dedicated to helping pediatric hospitals better serve the mental health needs of children and adolescents across the U.S.<\/p>\n
The Laguna Beach-based nonprofit was founded in 2023 by longtime business leaders Douglas Corbin and Cary Hyden, who spent years working together at Children\u2019s Hospital of Orange County, now named Rady Children\u2019s Health after its merger with Rady Children\u2019s Hospital San Diego.<\/p>\n
Clavis has been involved with Omada from the start and made a \u201csizeable\u201d donation to the organization with plans to invest more as it gets closer to holding its first major event, according to Vopat.<\/p>\n
Omada on April 25 plans to hold a private fundraising concert at MGM Music Hall at Fenway Park in Boston. The three-time Grammy Award-winning Zac Brown Band will be performing.
Proceeds will help fund future fundraising events, pediatric hospital-led pilot programs, and other key initiatives.<\/p>\n
\u2014Yuika Yoshida<\/p>\n
McClure\u2019s Next Venture is Health Tech<\/p>\n
Stuart McClure, who has 30 years of experience in cybersecurity, is known to have pioneered the use of AI and machine learning to proactively prevent cyberattacks rather than just detect them.<\/p>\n
Since selling Cylance to Canada-based BlackBerry Ltd. for $1.5 billion in 2019, McClure has been involved in other tech companies.<\/p>\n
He joined Qwiet AI as CEO in 2022. The San Jose-based firm, previously known as ShiftLeft, aims to prevent cyberattacks by identifying vulnerabilities in code and was acquired by Harness for an undisclosed amount last September.<\/p>\n
McClure\u2019s latest venture is called Wethos AI.<\/p>\n
The Newport Beach-based startup, founded in 2023, uses artificial intelligence to generate insights into employees\u2019 work habits and behaviors, then provides suggestions to improve performance.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s one of the first companies to come out of McClure\u2019s Newport Beach business incubator and accelerator, NumberOneAI, founded in 2021, and which has raised approximately $13 million to date for companies working with AI and machine learning.<\/p>\n
McClure said that the company\u2019s been in \u201cheavy R&D mode\u201d for the last two and a half years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re now starting to see the results of all that and getting it into the market,\u201d McClure said.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s now turning his attention to healthcare, hinting at a new personalized health tech company he\u2019s founded that\u2019s in the late stages of development and preparing to launch later this year.<\/p>\n
McClure explained that the company uses AI to build a profile of a person made up of their symptoms, genetics and family history to target any healthcare goal, from preventing cancer recurrence to something as simple as improving sleep.<\/p>\n
One of the biggest challenges with AI in these contexts is that it has no memory, according to McClure.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo of course, it hallucinates and there are errors, but we\u2019re fixing and resolving all of those,\u201d McClure said.<\/p>\n
The inspiration behind the new company was a breast cancer diagnosis for McClure\u2019s wife, Tusdi Vopat, and her experience with having to see several specialized providers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is really going to turn the tables on the way that we look at health,\u201d Vopat said. \u201cIt\u2019s really about personalized, whole person health and how you can make changes specific to you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2014Yuika Yoshida<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A gift from the couple Stuart McClure and Tusdi Vopat is establishing an endowed chair for integrative health…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160476,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164],"class_list":["post-160475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}