Dr. Stager also knows that the patients who are most impacted by these issues — families that are stricken by poverty, patients of color, and those most marginalized by our healthcare system — are less likely to vote often because of the barriers to voting or through outright voter disenfranchisement.

What does she do with this knowledge? She helps her patients vote through a new badge she clipped on to her hospital ID a few months ago.

The badge is part of a free resource for all health care providers called a Healthy Democracy Kit made by our organization, Vot-ER, a nonpartisan nonprofit geared towards helping promote civic engagement in healthcare settings. This kit includes a “Ready to Vote?” lanyard, a voter registration badge clipped onto a pre-existing hospital ID, and a QR-code or text shortcode that patients use to check their voter registration status, register to vote, or get an absentee ballot using their own phone.

And Dr. Stager put that badge to use a lot in the 2020 election. She talked to nearly every voting age eligible patient in her clinic. She likely helped dozens, if not hundreds, of patients get ready to vote ahead of the 2020 election.

She was not alone. Over 25,000 healthcare providers across the country received these Healthy Democracy Kits to do the same. They are part of a growing movement of healthcare providers who are increasingly becoming aware of the link between health and voting.

Why might healthcare providers care about voting? On a nightly basis we see the cost of our unequal healthcare system. We see the young mother of two who has recently been made homeless and instead of spending another cold night in her van with her two kids, comes to the ER looking for respite only to be discharged right back out to the frigid night air. We see the young diabetic who rations her insulin vials like so many like sacred pearls not sure of when the next opportunity to replenish her supplies might be. We saw how the faces of those we put on to ventilators through the worst of the pandemic were disproportionately black and brown.

When we asked our providers why they wanted to help their patients vote, overwhelmingly, and, perhaps surprisingly, they said they were not simply motivated by the historic 2020 election. Over three quarters of the respondents surveyed identified broader issues that impacted the health of their patients including social and racial inequities, the pandemic, and wanting to have a stake in influencing the policy decisions that affect their patients downstream.

One of the patients Dr. Stager helped to register was named Lauryn. Lauryn was 21 years old and had never voted before. Using her Vot-ER Healthy Democracy Kit, Dr. Stager helped Lauryn register to vote for the first time. Surprised by how easy the process was, Lauryn went home and helped her two sisters and her parents, none of whom were registered to vote, walk through the process of getting registered to vote for the first time as well.

As a trusted health care provider, Dr. Stager served as a powerful messenger about the importance of voting and how doing so impacts the broader upstream policies in a time when trusted messengers are badly needed.

In the 2020 election, physicians and other healthcare providers helped nearly 47,000 patients and colleagues get ready to vote using Vot-ER. Like Lauryn, some might have also helped others to get ready to vote as well.

Physicians like Dr. Stager can be the initial force that sends a ripple downstream that mobilizes a new wave of unlikely voters.

It’s not only individual healthcare providers who are helping patients vote. In August 2020, National Civic Health Month brought over 100 medical associations and organizations together with the singular aim of making it easier for their staff and patients to vote. These organizations collectively are reshaping what it means to address the upstream structural determinants of health that impact our patients and produce devastating social and racial inequities.

These activities in civic engagement were not just confined to the 2020 election. Over 2,000 physicians and other healthcare providers in Georgia helped mobilize their patients to vote in the Senate runoff. In Boston, institutions like Massachusetts General Hospital are promoting civic engagement and voting during the COVID vaccination process.

The landscape of healthcare-based civic engagement is nascent but has the potential to help transform our healthcare system and politics in our country by creating a more inclusive American democracy. Organizations like Med Out The Vote, Patient Voting, Minnesota Doctors for Health Equity, and Vot-ER are at the frontier of this movement.

As healthcare providers, we bear witness to the ways in which our healthcare system hurts our patients. For too long, we have sat on the sidelines and watched. Increasingly, healthcare providers of all ages, races, and geographies are coming off the bench and helping to reshape our healthcare system by prescribing a new treatment: voting.