Improving Hematological Care for Vulnerable Patients
Early in Ruxandra Irimia’s hematology residency, she prescribed one of her elderly patients drugs to treat his blood cancer. Since the patient was illiterate, she couldn’t simply hand him a schedule for taking the medicines.
She then realized that overcoming the effects of inadequate education and poverty required her to become creative. At this moment, that meant drawing up a color-coded medication schedule.
“As a clinician, all I could do was save one life at a time. The question was, how could I start saving millions at a time?”
It was no secret that patients with lower socioeconomic and education status had worse outcomes compared to those with more resources, Irimia said. They often had lower medical literacy or none at all, difficulty traveling to metropolitan areas for care, little money for prescriptions, and received a lower level of care than patients with greater resources.
Seeing patients individually, Irimia felt helpless to solve these problems. But, after she won an award from the American Society of Hematology to train at Johns Hopkins Hospital for three months—an appointment that led to a year-long Johns Hopkins oncology fellowship—she learned more about public health and the Bloomberg School. Now an MPH student here, Irimia plans to study health systems and policy, with the goal of eventually improving the care and safety of patients with hematological cancers in Romania and other low- and middle-income countries.
“My goal is that no matter where a patient with hematological cancer lives, they will have the same standard of care,” she says.
