Wisconsin healthcare providers help patients register to vote

Image from VotER website

Wisconsin healthcare professionals are participating in a national effort to help patients register to vote.

VotER originated from a research project at Massachusetts General Hospital that helped register patients while they were waiting for care at the emergency room.

“The bulk of our work comes from the belief that more voices in healthcare will yield better outcomes,” VotER Chief Operating Officer Aliya Bhatia said. “More voices in healthcare means we get a better system.”

In Wisconsin, the organization is working with Progressive Community Health Centers, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ascension St. Joe’s and Ascension St. Francis.

VotER was planning to put voter registration kiosks in waiting rooms, but those efforts came to a halt in March as providers pivoted to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

So VotER shifted to focus its efforts on other ways to boost registration, like helping launch Civic Health Month in August and providing healthcare professionals with badges that patients can scan with their smartphones for voting information.

Jonathan Kusner, a fourth-year medical student at Harvard Medical School who directs Midwest outreach efforts for VotER, said they hope the Healthy Democracy Kits will help “normalize a culture of civic engagement in healthcare.”

Their message is to get people involved in the political system, not in a manner that is specific to issue or party.

“How we approach this work is with a healthy acknowledgement that we don’t have all the answers and that answers will be best informed by broader participation,” Kusner said. “There has always been an avoidance of political engagement in healthcare, and that’s probably because we have done a poor job of disentangling political involvement and partisan or issue-based involvement.”

As of mid-last week, the organization had provided 215 kits to providers in Wisconsin, with more on the way, according to Bhatia.

Sarah Francois, director of fund development and marketing at Progressive Community Health Centers, said the program fits in well with their interest in getting involved with voter registration efforts.

Francois said they’ve received a kiosk, which they’ve set up at their Lisbon Avenue location in Milwaukee. However, most of their efforts have been focused on using a text messaging service they’ve been relying on to reach patients during the pandemic about COVID-19 testing and safety tips.

Francois said they are set to roll out the scannable badges to staff. And they’ve been including voter registration information in all their COVID-19 care packages when people come in for testing.

“It’s been pretty well received by our patients,” Francois said. “The messages that we have gotten back from our patients from the testing campaign have all been positive.”

This article first appeared in the Wisconsin Health News daily email newsletter. Sign up for your free trial here.