Oprah’s Angel Network

Project HEALTH, a 2009 Angel Network grantee, taps college volunteers to make a difference in our nation’s health care system.

A doctor can prescribe any number of antibiotics to cure an infection, but for a family living out of its car or facing an empty pantry at home, the medical solution will rarely solve the underlying problem.

To close the chasm between circumstances and health outcomes, social entrepreneur Rebecca Onie established Project HEALTH, a nonprofit organization that specializes in training college volunteers to operate help desks in medical centers, where they make resource connections for patients.

Project HEALTH founder Rebecca Onie (left) trains college students to provide resource connections for low-income patients.

Photo courtesy of Project HEALTH

“A prescription for food is frankly going to be as important as the prescription for antibiotics—you know the family will need both these things to be healthy,” said Rebecca, whose own volunteer experience at the Boston Medical Center Pediatrics Department opened her eyes to the “staggering mismatch” between the needs of low-income patients and the infrastructure deficit in health care systems.

At hospitals and clinics around the country, it is common to find only one social worker responsible for assisting thousands of patients a year. And with the heavy caseload of doctors, it can be a challenge to do anything beyond diagnosing a patient’s immediate symptoms.

Relieving a Burdened System

At the 14 medical centers where Project HEALTH operates its help desks, doctors prescribe resources just as they would drugs. After a consultation, the family takes the prescription to the volunteer-staffed help desk in the waiting room the same way they would take a prescription for drugs to a pharmacy.

“It’s well-documented in the medical literature that access to these kind of basic resources—food, housing, fuel assistance, exercise programs, job training—directly impact the health of low-income patients,” said Rebecca, who sees her program as a model that could be replicated to help lower health care costs by encouraging preventive medicine and taking stress off a burdened system.

Project HEALTH currently recruits on 10 university campuses in New York City, Boston, Chicago, Providence and Baltimore. The recruitment and training process is rigorous—in past years, only 10 percent of the applicants were accepted. Last year 600 students committed to a minimum of six hours of service a week for one year, with many working far more than the minimum.

Project HEALTH taps college students for several reasons. Besides being a readily available workforce, they bring technical expertise and tenacity to tracking down information for families—whether it’s as simple as Googling directions to a food bank or navigating a family through a bureaucratic maze of paperwork to apply for food stamps.

While the help desk model provides immediate assistance to families, it also creates an important leadership pipeline for students who go onto medical school, social work or other fields related to health or poverty issues.

First Lady Michele Obama recognized the efficacy of Project HEALTH at the Time 100 Most Influential People Awards. Founder Rebecca Onie (right) attended the event.

Photo courtesy of Project HEALTH

For Mia Lozada, a 2008 graduate of the University of Chicago-Pritzker School of Medicine and current internal medicine resident in San Francisco, the volunteer experience broadened her view of what it means to be a health care professional.

“I recognize now that the doctor alone can’t make a difference in the patient’s life,” Mia noted. “You can write the prescription, but if they need the money for that prescription to feed their family, you need to be able to help them get food stamps.”

It’s this type of powerful realization from a future doctor that attracted the attention of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and New Profit Inc., two of Project HEALTH’s biggest supporters and advocates. First Lady Michele Obama, who first learned about the organization in her prior role as head of community affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center, recognized Project HEALTH in her speech at Time’s 100 Most Influential People Awards.

The recognition confirms Rebecca’s most important reason for leading Project HEALTH.

“We are producing a generation of young people that have a real belief that we can have a different kind of health care system,” said Rebecca, “and a real sense of commitment to being leaders in the creation of that system.”

Find out more about Project HEALTH.

UPDATE: Rebecca Onie was awarded a 2009 MacArthur Fellow. Each year, the MacArthur Foundation awards 24 grants to promising change makers. Watch her discuss Project HEALTH