A CT man didn’t know he had cancer. Then he got a call that helped him get treatment and pay for it

Students from the University of Connecticut are reaching out to patients at UConn Health to help those whose income, medical history or other issues may threaten their overall well-being.

One aspect of the UConn Health Leaders program is reaching out to those who are at risk for lung cancer. That’s how Sarah Bellizzi, 21, of Berlin, who graduated as a pre-med student in May, recently succeeded in helping Pellumb Medolli get screened and ultimately treated for lung cancer.

Medolli, 71, of East Hartford has broken his 50-year smoking habit and is feeling better than he has in a long time, according to his daughter, Amy Johnson. Medolli, an Albanian immigrant, doesn’t speak English.

Bellizzi, who is applying for medical school, said the program involves “screening patients for social determinants of health, which is pretty much just barriers that patients face, and it makes it more challenging for them to receive health care.”

The issues patients face might be access to food, housing, insurance or transportation, Bellizzi said. One of the ways she helped Medolli was to connect him to financial aid to pay for his surgery.

UConn Health Leaders are located at the urgent care center in Storrs, the Family Medical Center at Asylum Hill, John Dempsey Hospital in Farmington and St. Francis Hospital in Hartford.

The students screen patients of all backgrounds and income levels. The lung cancer screening is a more specialized branch of the program, in which people who need screenings are called by phone.

“We get a list of patients that are eligible for lung cancer screenings based on risk factors they’ve presented to their primary care physician, and we would call them and try to schedule a lung cancer screening appointment with them,” Bellizzi said.

“Basically, we’d call radiology with them, try to schedule that appointment, or we’d follow up with them, make sure they’re going to their appointment, things like that,” she said.

Knowing Medolli didn’t speak English, “I had the line for a translator ready” when she made the call, Bellizzi said. When Johnson answered, “I explained that he’s eligible for lung cancer screening,” she said.

“She expressed that they had some financial concerns with insurance. So I gave her the UConn Health financial phone number. And so they were able to talk with her and figure out the insurance piece,” she said.

Bellizzi called back in a week or two to follow up and scheduled the radiology appointment. Medolli needed just a lumpectomy. “So in that case, I guess that’s why they’re saying I helped,” Bellizzi said.

Johnson was skeptical when she received the call, and nervous about what her father’s screening would find.

“She did let me know that because he’s a heavy smoker they have started to do screenings for someone in his situation, and that’s how it started,” she said.

Johnson was afraid to “start opening a can of worms. I got a feeling that something was going to come out of it. I just had my gut feeling and, yeah, the scan did detect stage 1 lung cancer.”

Her father is on Medicare, but Johnson wasn’t sure if his robotic surgery would be covered. “It is comforting to know that UConn does offer financial services if needed, because I’m sure there are people who might have an insurance that doesn’t cover everything,” she said.

The recovery wasn’t quick, Johnson said, and Medolli has been tired and “not feeling great” at times.

“He did stop smoking, which is another victory,” she said. “He pretty much went cold turkey. He hasn’t smoked since because he knows that’s it. He’s done with that.”

Dr. Christopher Steele, a hospitalist at UConn Health and co-founder of the Health Leaders program, said he and Dr. Henry Siccardi, now a first-year resident, saw a gap in bringing health care to patients who were food insecure, or spoke English as a second language or had other social determinants of health insecurity.

“The reason why we did this is we found that in typical medical care, especially when we started this in 2019, a lot of the time the most vulnerable patients aren’t receiving the care they should get,” he said.

“And the reasons for this is because I feel like the health care system doesn’t do a good enough job looking for those reasons, why patients aren’t getting the care they need,” he said.

It also seemed like a good idea to involve students interested in medical careers. “They could provide the direct-care aspect of this, which we thought was super-important,” Steele said. “And then what we wanted to do too is teach them ways that they can basically figure out what these things are and actually be the drivers to address it.”

In three years, 303 volunteers have screened almost 9,000 patients and found 5,945 with unmet needs, Steele said. “And we helped 2,115 of them get connected to community partnerships to address those disparities,” he said.

“The reason why it’s important is that a lot of the times … if we don’t figure out what these barriers are, patients just can’t get the care … That’s where a lot of the times we’ll see certain patients having worse health outcomes compared to others,” he said.

The students interview the patients using scripts on an iPad. “The cool part about this is we created an algorithm within our scripts to immediately ask the patient after, do you want help addressing this?” Steele said.

“And if they said yes, then what it does is it generates a localized resource that helps them address that issue live on the spot and actually even has a script within it for the volunteer to go through and call the place,” he said.

That addresses the issue of patients not following up on the information they’ve been given, Steele said.

“For example, if I popped up positive food insecure and I wanted help, the algorithm would actually create a script that would tell somebody to connect them to Hands on Hartford, which is an organization that deals specifically with food insecurity,” he said.

Steele said the program is successful from the students’ perspective too. “I’ve seen, just culturally, people get more interested in getting to know the entire individual,” he said. Several students have gone on to UConn’s medical school, which Bellizzi said she hopes to do.

“Some of them have actually gone on to get their master’s of public health because a lot of stuff that we’re dealing with is actually allied with that as well,” he said.

Siccardi is one of those who took an extra year after medical school to get his public health degree.

“I had done two different programs when I was trying to get into medical school and they did similar work,” he said. “They did part of what we were doing, but none of them really put everything together. What I learned from those programs was that there was a real opportunity because patients really needed assistance with some of their unmet social needs.”

Siccardi also saw that “the health care system wanted to address these issues, but there really wasn’t the bandwidth there,” in time, training and resources.

“Then there was this third problem floating around out there and that was, if you’re trying to go into medicine or health care, it’s hard to get opportunities to interact meaningfully with patients,” he said.

“So I thought, what if we just equip college students who are interested in health care, give them the resources and the training that they would need to identify and address those issues that I mentioned before.”

While students are busy, “they’re not quite as busy as the rest of the team. They usually have time to volunteer,” Siccardi said. “It’s a win-win-win for everybody.”

While Siccardi believes the program is working well, he sees ways to make it better.

“The first thing that I think I’d like to do to improve is really get the community to know who we are, so that when our volunteers call, they know what we’re doing and they know why we’re calling and there’s communication between us,” he said.

“The second big thing is I’d love to integrate social work students even as undergrads, because they’re really going to spend their careers if they go into health care doing this kind of work.”

Finally, Siccardi would like to expand the types of student backgrounds who are involved in the program, such as first-generation students and those from the inner city.

The students get intense training to be part of the program, Siccardi said. “They do get HIPAA training, both through the institution and they also get HIPAA training with us. The thing is, the volunteers are being treated as essentially part of the care team, so they’re able to access (patients’) charts but they can’t discuss it outside of that clinical situation.”

Ed Stannard can be reached at estannard@courant.com.