The Family Van/Harvard Medical School:: The Hidden Value of Mobile Healthcare
Mobile clinics could play a transformative role in the health care system — and not just as roving emissaries for hospitals.
That was the conclusion we reached in our work with Harvard Medical School and its own mobile clinic, Family Van. We concluded that the real value of mobile clinics is the way they literally meet patients where they live, upending the social norms of medicine. This helps mobile clinics improve patients’ adherence to treatment and sense of agency in their own care – precious knowledge in a shifting health care system.
Further, we imagined the upshot of assigning “very attentive” graduate students to every mobile clinic, and concluded that, with enough data from a variety of settings, researchers could hypothetically identify the crucial ways in which these health workers help patients feel safe, empowered, and open to medical advice.
The insights – also captured in an article in Harvard Medical School News – informed our work in the social determinants of health, including development of the graduate nursing program at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.