Medical Students’ Project Improves Rural Health Care Access

June 28, 2024 by Janet Essman Franz

A Gold Foundation fellowship project by Lindsay Aldrich ’25 and Richard Vuong ’25 has led to an innovative new health care delivery vehicle and a novel technology agreement between UVM’s biomedical engineering design hub and the UVM Health Network. The project aims to bring the doctor’s office to people living in Vermont’s rural regions.

During their first year of medical school, Class of 2025 medical students Lindsay Aldrich and Richard Vuong won a competitive fellowship from the Arnold P. Gold Foundation to develop an idea: They envisioned bringing the doctor’s office to new mothers and infants in rural regions of Vermont via a mobile health clinic.

Vuong and Aldrich developed a proposal to create and launch a mobile clinic in Vermont to provide postpartum visits in rural regions. Their project was selected for a Gold Foundation Student Summer Fellowship, and the pair spent the summer of 2022 implementing their project, which involved collaborating with undergraduate and graduate students and faculty in UVM’s Center for Biomedical Innovation (CBI) to create a prototype of a mobile clinic. They named the clinic U-Health, inspired by the potential of retrofitting a U-Haul moving truck. 

Read the full story.