By Greg Thompson, President and CEO, Amerigroup Texas
“I’ve learned more in the last five days than I had over the last year.”
That’s Jade Pool. She just finished her first year at the Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine (TCOM) at The University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth. Jade was one of 30 people on TCOM’s medical mission trip to rural and border communities in West Texas this summer.
Amerigroup Texas has been sponsoring the trip for several years. It speaks directly to our work reinventing healthcare — especially in rural and remote areas — through partnerships that make it more accessible.
Click here to watch the thank-you video to Amerigroup from TCOM students.
Over about five days, Jade’s group saw a total of 122 patients — in many cases, as she notes, a sizeable percentage of each community’s population walked through the door for help and treatment.
The experience especially hit home for Jade, who grew up in the small town of Sundown not too far away (at least by Texas standards). She wrote:
“I grew up in West Texas, just four hours north, and I knew even before entering the world of health care that we were lacking. … We did not have a doctor in town or a clinic, so I understood to an extent what rural West Texans experience regarding health care. However, I did not realize how much a student like me can learn from actually treating patients with these conditions. Every human I served that week taught me something. Each of them opened my eyes to the realities of West Texas rural health and the existing disparities.”
Read Jade’s post on the mission trip here.
These kinds of stories are what get us out of bed every morning. So are the faces in the TCOM video. These people, and the great work they do, embody Elevance and Amerigroup’s commitment to improve the health of humanity — in this case by increasing access to care for people who need it the most, and by finding creative programs and partners to help us do it.