Congratulations to Geisel medical students Timothy McAuliffe MED‘25, Michelle Dong MED’25, Rachael Chacko MED‘25, and Adriana Radosavljevic MED‘26 who were awarded the Presidential Poster Award for their poster presentation titled “Increasing Access to Colonoscopies for Under-Resourced Patients at Good Neighbor Health Clinic: Success of a Free Community Clinic and Academic Medical Center Partnership” at the American College of Gastroenterology Conference on Monday, October 28th, 2024. Approximately 5% of accepted abstracts annually receive this distinction for high-quality, novel, unique, or interesting research.
While volunteering at Good Neighbor Health Clinic (GNHC), the students noticed a pattern amongst the uninsured and underinsured patients—they were coming into the GI clinic with positive fecal immunochemical tests (a screening tool for colorectal cancer) or other concerning GI symptoms, but could not afford the required necessary follow-up diagnostic colonoscopy. After recognizing this gap in care, these students pursued their first-year Patients & Populations Making a Difference (MaD) at Geisel project on this topic to understand the role of colonoscopies in GI care, community needs, and possible funding models.
While this project formally concluded at the end of their first year, these four students were curious to better understand the scope and impact of these barriers to care and continued their work into their clinical years. They analyzed data from GNHC, Vermont Coalition of Clinics for the Uninsured, and Vermont’s Free and Referral Clinics Patient Management Registry Data to quantify the unmet need for diagnostic colonoscopies. The students identified that this unmet need for diagnostic colonoscopies could be addressed with external funding.
The team of four medical students, along with Timothy Gardner, MD, MS, assistant dean for medical student research at Geisel, one of the gastroenterologists supervising students at the clinic, and Lauren Barry, the administrative director of the Center of Digestive Health, connected with Dartmouth Health leadership to inaugurate a program that would help patients obtain free diagnostic colonoscopies. Dartmouth Health granted GNHC funding for 10 diagnostic colonoscopies a year at no cost to underresourced patients or GNHC. Since the program’s initiation in October 2023, three patients have successfully obtained colonoscopies through the charity care funding model at no cost.
The students are grateful to the section of Gastroenterology and Hepatology and DH for their generosity in donating funds and time to support diagnostic colonoscopies for GNHC patients. They also hope this can serve as a model for other community-based programs to expand care for under-resourced patients.
Written and submitted by Michelle Dong, Timothy McAuliffe, Rachael Chacko, and Adriana Radosavljevic
