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Can I talk to my patients/clients about voting?

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Can I talk to my patients/clients about voting?

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YES! Find scripts here to guide you

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Check your own voter registration status, register or request a mail in ballot in your state, and sign up for text alerts, then share this link in your email signature, your instagram bio, and wherever else you can think of to help others do the same!

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We help you vote, no matter what. Sign up for election reminders and get help with voter registration and voting by mail - all in one place!

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Vot-ER is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization working to integrate civic engagement into healthcare. We partner with over 700 institutions to bring nonpartisan civic engagement tools and programs to every corner of the healthcare system.

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BOSTON (AP) - An emergency room doctor in Boston is assembling thousands of voter registration kits for distribution at hospitals and doctor's offices.

Later this month, students at Harvard and Yale's medical schools are planning a contest to see which of the Ivy League rivals can register the most voters.

And a Rhode Island physician has launched an effort to get emergency ballots into the hands of patients who find themselves unexpectedly in the hospital around Election Day.

Amid the dual public health crises of COVID-19 and racism, some in the medical community are prescribing a somewhat nontraditional remedy: voting.

Hospitals, doctors and healthcare institutions across the country this month are committing to efforts to engage Americans in the election process as part of Civic Health Month, a nationwide campaign that kicked off Aug. 1.

Hospital networks in Arizona, Kansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin and elsewhere are among more than 60 institutions participating, along with thousands of individual physicians.

Benjamin Ruxin, a Stanford University graduate student who heads the campaign, said the coronavirus pandemic underscores the importance of ensuring everyone can vote and help shape healthcare policy for the challenging times ahead.

Voter registration rates are down almost 70% in some states this election cycle because the traditional ways of registering voters have been curtailed by the pandemic, including DMVs and in-person registration drives, he said.

Alister Martin, an emergency room doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said he founded VotER to provide medical professionals voter registration resources after years of seeing patients struggling from the health consequences of poverty, drug addiction, homelessness and other social ills.

"We've been trained to solve these really complex health problems, but not everything we see can be treated with a prescription," he said. "The healthcare system does not work for vulnerable people - full stop. We have to help them get involved in the political process if we hope to change any of this."

The sheer number of organizations and the range of efforts being proposed during the monthlong campaign shows that the medical community is increasingly shedding its reticence at civic engagement, said Kelly Wong, an emergency medicine resident at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Where prior generations may have seen the voter registration and other nonpartisan election work as outside their purview or too overtly political, newer medical professionals see civic engagement as a crucial part of "treating the whole patient," she said.

Wong founded Patient Voting to get doctors and other hospital staff to commit to helping patients request, cast and submit emergency ballots when the time comes. The nearly three-year-old organization's website is also a repository of verified information about every state's emergency ballot process.

Another effort, called Med Out the Vote, is focused on getting medical students registered to vote and encouraging them to organize voter registration efforts on campus where possible.

Jonathan Kusner, a Harvard Medical School student who co-chairs the effort, said students at dozens of institutions have expressed interest, with a number looking to host head-to-head voter registration competitions against rival schools.

Medical students at the University of North Carolina recently bested their counterparts at Duke in a three-day contest that resulted in more than 500 total new voter registrations and requests for mail ballots, he said. Harvard and Yale students are planning a similar competition, as are those at Penn State and Ohio State.

Martin, meanwhile, said VotER is struggling to keep up with more than 15,000 orders for its "Healthy Democracy Kits," which include a badge and lanyard that doctors and other hospital staff can wear while on the job.

The badges have a QR code that, when scanned by a person's smartphone, will take them to TurboVote, an online tool that can guide them through the voter registration process and send them reminders about election deadlines. A helpline is also available to field any questions, he said.

"We're underwater and trying to get out these kits as fast as we can," Martin said. "It's a good problem to have, but at the same time, I wish this wasn't something that had to be done. Being able to vote should be automatic for all citizens."

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This story has been corrected to show that Kelly Wong is an emergency medical resident at Brown University, not a medical school student.

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Doctors, hospitals launch voter registration efforts

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BOSTON (AP) - An emergency room doctor in Boston is assembling thousands of voter registration kits for distribution at hospitals and doctor's offices. Later this month, students at Harvard and Yale's medical schools are planning a contest to see which of the Ivy League rivals can register the most voters.

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As the pandemic curbs in-person voter registration, a growing number of doctors and nurses are registering their patients to vote.

Dr. Alister Martin starting his commute to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where he has created a kiosk to register patients to vote. Credit... Tony Luong for The New York Times

BOSTON - The sign is easy to miss in the waiting room of the emergency department at Massachusetts General Hospital, next to the reception desk and a hand sanitizer pump. "Register to vote here," it says, above an iPad attached to a lectern.

The kiosk has stood there since November, before the pandemic began and stayed there through the worst weeks of April, when 12 gasping patients were put on ventilators during a single grueling 12-hour shift.

Now, as the number of coronavirus patients has slowed to a trickle, Dr. Alister Martin, the 31-year-old emergency room doctor who built the kiosk, is determined to keep trying to register voters.

"There will be a time where, above the din of suffering we ask, 'How can we use this to make something better of our situation?'" vowed Dr. Martin, who always sports a "Ready to Vote?" badge around his neck.

Dr. Martin's project, VotER, has taken on new urgency as the pandemic has curbed traditional in-person voter-registration efforts, and as the link between public policy failures and death has become especially clear.

Now, despite a pandemic - or perhaps because of it - his project is spreading across the country. Since May, more than 3,000 health care providers have requested kits to register their own patients to vote, including at flagship hospitals across the country in Pennsylvania, Kansas and Arizona.

VotER is part of a larger movement that pushes medical professionals to address the underlying social conditions - such as hunger, drug addiction and homelessness - that make their patients sick in the first place. At its core, it amounts to nothing less than an effort to change the culture of medicine by getting doctors and nurses to view the "civic health" of their patients as part of their professional duties.

Supporters of this movement say the health care system tends to work best for communities that vote, so encouraging voting is a strategy for improving patient health in the long term. Jonathan Kusner, a fourth-year medical student who is co-chair of Med Out the Vote, a get-out-the-vote initiative started by the American Medical Student Association, said his group was encouraging primary care doctors to include "Are you registered to vote?" on intake screening questionnaires, similar to questions about domestic violence.

"Just as we ask people to behaviorally modify their diet or their exercise or their health, we could ask people to modify their civics," said Mr. Kusner, whose organization has teamed up with VotER to promote voter registration in hospitals around the country.

But some health care professionals frown on voter registration efforts, fearing that they could be viewed as partisan. After years of being dependably Republican, doctors are now more likely to be Democrats.

Others worry that registering voters is beyond the scope of what medical professionals should be asking their patients. Few doctors have been trained to discuss voter registration in a nonpartisan way, and many emergency room doctors already feel overwhelmed by their work as it is.

"There is an enormous voice that says, 'Not our job,'" said Dr. Harrison Alter, the founding executive director of the Andrew Levitt Center for Social Emergency Medicine, which helped popularize a new medical field called "social emergency medicine" that trains doctors to tackle social conditions that make patients sick.

But newly minted doctors tend to be more outspoken about the need to get involved in enfranchising patients, and trying to fix a broken health care system.

"Previously, physicians taking a political stance was seen as possibly unprofessional," said Dr. Kelly Wong, the founder of Patient Voting, a Rhode Island-based effort to provide hospitalized patients with information that can help them navigate the gantlet of voting from a hospital bed. "Civic engagement of our patients and our communities is really important to changing health outcomes."

Dr. Martin, who grew up in New Jersey with a single mother, said he identified with his emergency room patients who struggle to make ends meet. At Harvard Medical School, he became disillusioned realizing how much time doctors spent on paperwork and the power of insurance companies to dictate what treatments are prescribed.

He considered leaving medicine for good and earned a master's degree in public policy. Then he worked as a health policy aide to the governor of Vermont during that state's experiment with single-payer health care.

Eventually, he returned to medicine, finishing his residency last year. He is already full of stories about public-policy failures that make patients sick. He speaks with passion about the 19-year-old woman who came in twice in one week with a life-threatening condition related to diabetes.

In medical school they called it "noncompliance." She was not taking her insulin as instructed. But Dr. Martin realized after talking with her that she had been rationing insulin because she had lost her health insurance.

Then there was the woman who came in on Christmas Eve with stomach pains. Her urine sample revealed high levels of ketones, a sign that she had not eaten in days. That, too, was not the kind of problem he had been taught to solve in medical school.

"Gunshot wound? Save them. Heart attack? Diagnose it. Stroke? Fix it," he said of his training. "Really the thing that keeps you up at night is, 'This woman was here for abdominal pains because she was starving.' I don't have an answer for that."

Last year, just a few months after Dr. Martin was hired as a full-fledged emergency room doctor and a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School's Center for Social Justice and Health Equity, he asked hospital administrators for permission to put up voting kiosks. They agreed, as long as the effort was nonpartisan and did not infringe on treatment.

Dr. Martin installed TurboVote software on a few iPads and affixed them to lecterns that he bought online. He also put up posters with QR codes that patients can scan with cellphones, automatically bringing up a website where they can register to vote.

The project was just getting started - with about one patient a day registering to vote and about a dozen hospitals expressing an interest in the kiosks - when the pandemic struck. Emergency rooms filled with terrified people demanding tests. The iPad touch screens became a source of possible infections. Hospitals that had ordered kiosks stopped returning his calls.

Massachusetts General Hospital took on the look of a military camp, with a tent for the homeless people who awaited their results. In April, at the peak of surge, Dr. Martin noticed that most of the sickest people were low-income Spanish speakers - essential workers who could not shelter in place.

The virus was laying bare the disparities in the health care system that Dr. Martin was already trying to combat.

Instead of sidetracking VotER, the pandemic has only raised interest in the project. After months of watching the mismanagement of the response, and fearing for their own lives as well as their patients', many doctors and nurses now see the connection between their work and politics more clearly.

"There are more nurses interested, more doctors interested," said Aliza Narva, the director of ethics at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania of her hospital system's efforts to register patients to vote. "I would guess that people really saw the implication that policy can have on the actual care that we are able to deliver."

She said some were pushing to include voter registration information on hospital discharge documents.

The kits have already arrived in Lawrence, Kan., where Dr. Sherri L. Vaughn has arranged for the QR code posters to hang in the emergency room, radiology waiting rooms and the cafeteria at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, as well as at primary care offices in town. Dr. Vaughn also serves on the board of the Kansas Hospital Association, which embraced the effort as the logical extension of its earlier efforts to register doctors and nurses to vote.

"It has gone out to every hospital in Kansas," she said.

So far, this month about 500 people have registered to vote using the QR code on VotER posters and badges worn by health care providers, about twice as many as had registered during the previous three months. And Dr. Martin has received so many orders that he is not sure how his small team of volunteers will fill them all.

The pandemic has put an edge in his normally cheerful demeanor that was not there before. If health care providers want a system that works, he said, they have to "step up."

"The time for us being impartial and apolitical and standing on the sideline is over," he said.

The virus has also given Dr. Martin another avenue to bring up the topic of voting with his patients. He advises his patients, especially the most fragile, that it is safest to vote from home in November. "Do you already have your mail-in ballot?" he asks them, pointing to the QR code on his badge. "You can get one here."

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In Era of Sickness, Doctors Prescribe Unusual Cure: Voting

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As the pandemic curbs in-person voter registration, a growing number of doctors and nurses are registering their patients to vote. BOSTON - The sign is easy to miss in the waiting room of the emergency department at Massachusetts General Hospital, next to the reception desk and a hand sanitizer pump.

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Our country is stuck in a startling paradox: in poll after poll, Americans say healthcare is their single most important issue, yet 51 million forego a considerable amount of power in shaping our nation's health policy - because they aren't registered to vote. The COVID-19 pandemic has only deepened this paradox: the importance of our health system is startlingly clear, while registering to vote is harder than ever.

During this painful and challenging time, Americans have put their trust in healthcare providers. Hospitals, doctors and nurses have earned a higher approval rating than any other industry since the pandemic began. After six months of witnessing the disproportionate impacts of the pandemic on Black, brown and low-income Americans, healthcare providers are not only working to reinforce this trust, but also to extend it beyond hospital and clinic walls by emphasizing the importance of civic engagement in improving health outcomes for everyone.

Historically, healthcare providers have voted at lower rates than the general population. But this year is shaping up to be different - doctors, nurses, social workers and their colleagues are taking action, and inspiring others to do the same.

Since May, more than 14,000 healthcare providers from across the country have requested voter registration kits from VotER, a voter registration initiative founded by Dr. Alister Martin, an emergency physician at Mass General. Healthcare providers use these kits to facilitate conversations with their patients about voting, and patients are able to scan a QR code on the kit to register to vote or request a vote-by-mail ballot.

The project is getting national attention. In a recent New York Times piece, VotER was described as part of a "larger movement that pushes medical professionals to address the underlying social conditions - such as hunger, drug addiction and homelessness - that make their patients sick in the first place."

This movement is fundamentally changing the culture of healthcare by defining civic health and voter access as essential components of patient care. These healthcare providers are increasingly recognizing that their patients' physical and mental health is inextricably linked to their civic health, defined as "how equipped a community is to engage in activities that require collective action."

Right now, one of the most important remedies these healthcare providers can offer is a prescription for civic health, centered on informing patients how to register to vote, receive a mail-in ballot or vote safely in person.

Awareness of this new imperative is extending beyond individual providers and into medical institutions. A community health center in Milwaukee texted 10,000 patients to remind them to register to vote. The University of Pennsylvania hospital system ensures that hospitalized patients can vote on Election Day. The American Academy of Pediatrics encouraged its member pediatricians to sign up for voter registration kits. And medical students from rival schools Duke University and the University of North Carolina competed against each other to generate over 500 voter registrations and absentee ballot requests in just 12 days.

These institutions and their healthcare providers understand that for the health sector to recover - and continue to treat the communities and patients they serve effectively - patients and their providers need to come together to help repair what COVID-19 has damaged, one vote at a time.

This movement is fundamentally changing the culture of healthcare by defining civic health and voter access as essential components of patient care.

In recognition of this responsibility, more than 10,000 providers and 65 healthcare and civic engagement organizations are teaming up this August to launch Civic Health Month, a nationwide effort to raise awareness of the link between our democracy and our health. The goal is to empower our patients with the ability to vote - and vote safely - during the 2020 election.

Civic Health Month celebrates that the more civically engaged we are as a country, the healthier we will be. And most importantly, that voting gives people a voice in molding the policies that affect them. This is a core tenet of democracy - improving the rates at which we vote helps ensure that communities are built and shaped by the people who know them best.

We encourage healthcare providers across the country to join us in improving our patients' civic health. If you take care of patients, talk to them about voting. If you help to lead a hospital, join us as a partner. If you are a patient looking to register to vote or request your mail-in ballot, complete your Healthy Voter Checkup, then encourage your friends to do the same.

Together, we can build a healthier democracy.
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There's A New Remedy For The Sick: Voting

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Thousands of healthcare providers now consider helping a patient register to vote, receive a mail-in ballot or vote safely in person, an important responsibility. The more civically engaged we are as a country, the healthier we will be, write Dr. Ali S. Raja and Ben Ruxin.