The well-being of unhoused and underhoused children will be the focus of a pilot program at the medical school for the next 12 months.
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) recently presented WMed with a $15,000 AAMC Telehealth Equity Catalyst (TEC) Award for its project, titled “Telehealth Access Initiative for Youth Who Are Unhoused and Underhoused in Kalamazoo, Michigan.”
The Telehealth Equity Catalyst (TEC) Awards were launched as part of the AAMC’s efforts to support members’ work to advance telehealth equity. This year, AAMC funded 13 programs that can serve as models for other institutions to address and mitigate the barriers to care associated with telehealth care, particularly for communities that are under-resourced with limited access to health care services.
WMed will use the $15,000 award in collaboration with Street Medicine Kalamazoo to provide developmental-behavioral consultations via telehealth to families that are unhoused or underhoused in the year-long program. This project seeks to provide care where the patients are so they can get the care they need rather than requiring them to go into medical spaces, said Lisa Graves, MD, a professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, a family medicine physician and the project’s principal investigator.
“This grant is designed to try and meet the needs of the unhoused and to start creating a relationship that makes our providers and clinic a safe space for them,” Dr. Graves said. “Then when someone needs to be seen in person, they will have an established relationship with someone who understands.”
The funds will cover providers’ time and will ensure WMed has the necessary video and computer equipment to conduct the telehealth visits, Dr. Graves said. She said she plans to reach out to parents in the Kalamazoo community who have been unhoused to gather feedback about the additional support they would like to see from area healthcare providers.
Neelkamal Soares, MD, a professor in the departments of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine and Biomedical Informatics and a developmental-behavioral pediatrician, will work with Dr. Graves as a specialist on the project.
“It is critical to serve the needs of our community’s most disenfranchised members, the unhoused,” Dr. Soares said. “This collaboration of WMed’s behavioral health expertise and the Street Medicine program through telehealth is a partnership of mutual respect with intent to serve.”