June 26, 2012 | 8:15 AM |

What If Our Health Care System Kept Us Healthy?

FILED UNDER: Insurance, Medicine/Science, Money, Personal Health, emergency care, poverty, practicing medicine

Rebecca Onie is the cofounder of Health Leads, the Boston nonprofit that helps doctors “prescribe” basic necessities (housing, food, heat in winter) to low-income patients, in addition to just medications.

In her recent TEDMed talk, she asks some radical question: What if our health care system actually kept us healthy? What if doctors could truly prescribe solutions, not just drugs? What if ER waiting rooms around the country weren’t just places to watch the clock and read old copies of Good Housekeeping, but rather, were transformed into service-oriented, patient-centered hubs where, in a brutal New England winter, a family could go and a volunteer could help that family get the heat turned back on? Listen to Rebecca’s talk and get inspired:

About the author

Blogger, CommonHealth Rachel Zimmerman worked as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal for 10 years, most recently covering health and medicine out of the paper’s Boston bureau. Rachel has also written for The New York Times, the (now-defunct) Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the alternative newspaper Willamette Week, in Portland, Ore., among other publications. Rachel co-wrote a book about birth, published by Bantam/Random House, and spent 2008 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Rachel lives in Cambridge with her husband and two daughters. View all posts by Rachel Zimmerman →

  • Reasonable?

    Seems like an attempt to push the pendulum in wrong direction.
    We need more empowered patients and communities, not doctors with expanded abilities to prescribe.

    It sounds really nice though.

    • Rachel Zimmerman

      The docs don’t really have “expanded abilities” under this model. They simply “prescribe” the needed resource, whether it is food or housing assistance, and pass the script along to a volunteer out in the waiting room who then does all the work to connect the patient with the specific resource. It actually allows doctors to more fully focus on what they were trained to do: practice medicine. To learn more, check out the Health Leads website here: http://www.healthleadsusa.org/

      Rachel

  • Alyson

    That would be like prisons actually rehabilitating, educating and helping their populations do something other than become better criminals!