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The Impact of Student-Faculty Collaborative Clinics on Patients’ Health Seeking Behaviors in Underserved Communities

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Abstract

The Crimson Care Collaborative (CCC) is a network of seven student-faculty clinics in the Greater Boston area that provides primary care services to underserved patient populations and social services to address social determinants of health. Promoting healthy behaviors and health-seeking habits are among the most important focuses in the field of public health and medicine. The main objective of this study is to understand the influence that the student-faculty collaborative clinic in Chelsea has on where patients seek out medical information and if that influence changes with time. To study this phenomenon, a retrospective analysis was conducted for six years of data (2013–2019). The CCC Chelsea patient survey database included 349 surveys for 229 patients. McNemar’s test for paired patient survey data showed no significant difference between health information seeking preferences before and after a CCC visit ([2.783], p = 0.093). Chi-square comparing these three visit types is associated with a significant p-value of 0.025 (\({\chi }^{2}\) = 7.374). Patients who are at their second visit at CCC are more likely to report favoring reliable sources of medical information, and patients at their third visit are increasingly more likely to report first consulting reliable sources of medical information, including doctors and other healthcare providers. Fisher’s test showed no significant difference between health information seeking preferences for patients who last saw a health professional less than 6 months prior to survey administration and greater than 6 months prior to survey administration at a significance level of 0.05 (p = 0.06). Our results suggest that clinic attendance may have an impact on patients’ use of reputable sources of medical information in CCC Chelsea, and the positive impact that clinic attendance has on health information seeking habits may be long-standing.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Code Availability

Not applicable.

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Funding

The Crimson Care Collaborative is supported by the generosity of the John D. Stoeckle Center for Primary Care Innovation located at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Funding for statistical analysis was provided by Harvard Catalyst. Funding to conduct the research was provided by the Harvard College Research Program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Harvard College, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Rewan Abdelwahab & Maria Kaltchenko

  2. Crimson Care Collaborative, Boston, MA, USA

    Rewan Abdelwahab, Sarah Abdelwahab, Maria Kaltchenko, Mie Hallman, Gina Kruse, Jacqueline T. Chu & Marya J. Cohen

  3. Faculty of Medicine, University of Alexandria, Alexandria, Egypt

    Sarah Abdelwahab

  4. Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Gina Kruse, Jacqueline T. Chu & Marya J. Cohen

  5. Massachusetts General Hospital, 165 Cambridge St, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Mie Hallman, Gina Kruse, Jacqueline T. Chu & Marya J. Cohen

Authors
  1. Rewan Abdelwahab
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  2. Sarah Abdelwahab
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  3. Maria Kaltchenko
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  4. Mie Hallman
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  7. Marya J. Cohen
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Contributions

All authors contributed equally to the study and resulting manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marya J. Cohen.

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Conflicts of interest

There are no conflicts of interest nor competing interests to report.

Ethical Approval

The Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for this research was received.

Consent to Participate

Informed oral consent was received from each patient surveyed in their preferred language.

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Presentations: The preliminary findings of this research were presented at the 2019 Harvard Center for Primary Care Conference and 2019 Society of General Internal Medicine New England Conference.

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Abdelwahab, R., Abdelwahab, S., Kaltchenko, M. et al. The Impact of Student-Faculty Collaborative Clinics on Patients’ Health Seeking Behaviors in Underserved Communities. J Community Health 47, 378–386 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10900-021-01060-6

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