Sunjay Letchuman, BBA, is from Shreveport, Louisiana and is a second year medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He recently co-authored an article entitled Community Health Partners in Unexpected Places that looks at bringing healthcare beyond the walls of the hospital. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
AmNews: Please give us an overview about your research on healthcare outcomes.
Sunjay Letchuman: We spend 4.3 trillion dollars on healthcare every year and then don’t see the outcomes that you’d expect when you spend that much money. My work over these last few years, starting in college, has been focused on how we can improve health without either spending more money or spending very little additional money and then getting a bigger outcome. How can we reduce waste? How can we reduce spending in some areas and appropriate that spending in [other] areas?
What we have to do, what hospitals have to do, is look beyond their walls right now. Hospitals focus on ‘how do we improve care within these walls?’ and the standard idea is by improving care within these walls, we’re going to improve the health of our patients and our community, but the truth is, to really make a difference, they have to go beyond the walls of the hospital.
There’s no other option and that’s what [our] article focuses on. It’s called “Community Health Partners in Unexpected Places” and those are all places within the community. Sometimes
they’re next door to the hospital. That’s what our article focuses on, and it focuses on these other entities that are trusted and that are frequented. These are places that patients go to all the time, and they’re places that patients trust. Hospitals should look to these community partners that we talk about as they explore new and more meaningful ways to invest in their surrounding community. Frankly, I can’t think of a more impactful way to invest in the community than to partner with these trusted local services and organizations like barber shops, dollar stores, fire departments. There are so many potential partnerships and so many ways to make a much bigger impact than we can within the walls of the hospital.
AmNews: Could you expand more on what these partnerships would look like?
S.L.: You meet people where they’re at. Here’s the thing with our examples, to actually bring them into practice, it has to be a true partnership in the sense that the barber shop can’t do it alone and the hospital can’t do it alone and it takes buy-in from both, so the barber shop not only has to allow someone healthcare-related to come in but the barber himself or herself has to be involved. They’re the person who these [individuals] trust.
One of [our] most successful examples was where a pharmacist was there from the hospital to help lead some of those conversations after the barber talked about it to actually work on prescribing the blood pressure reducing medications.
AmNews: What specialty do you wish to focus on in the future?
S.L.: I really want to do a specialty that will allow me to do policy work. I want to dedicate my life to health policy. Ultimately, we want to get care to vulnerable patients before they come to the hospital. That’s why we wrote this article in the first place and the truth, there’s been a hundred ways we’ve tried to move the needle on disparities, and we’ve definitely made measurable improvements on a small scale but overall, when you look at life expectancy for [poorer] Americans it hasn’t really changed, even before COVID, in the last decade. So, to move the needle forward we can’t continue to do what we’re currently doing, and what we’re currently doing is delivering more and more care within the walls of the hospital.