In Era of Sickness, Doctors Prescribe Unusual Cure: Voting

Eventually, he returned to medicine, finishing his residency last year. He is already full of stories about public-policy failures that make patients sick. He speaks with passion about the 19-year-old woman who came in twice in one week with a life-threatening condition related to diabetes.

In medical school they called it “non-compliance.” She was not taking her insulin as instructed. But Dr. Martin realized after talking with her that she had been rationing insulin because she had lost her health insurance.

Then there was the woman who came in on Christmas Eve with stomach pains. Her urine sample revealed high levels of ketones, a sign that she had not eaten in days. That, too, was not the kind of problem he had been taught to solve in medical school.

“Gunshot wound? Save them. Heart attack? Diagnose it. Stroke? Fix it,” he said of his training. “Really the thing that keeps you up at night is, ‘This woman was here for abdominal pains because she was starving.’ I don’t have an answer for that.”

The Birth of an Experiment

Last year, just a few months after Dr. Martin was hired as a full-fledged emergency room doctor and a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Social Justice and Health Equity, he asked hospital administrators for permission to put up voting kiosks. They agreed, as long as the effort was nonpartisan and did not infringe on treatment.

Dr. Martin installed TurboVote software on a few iPads and affixed them to podiums that he bought online. He also put up posters with QR codes that patients can scan with cellphones, automatically bringing up a website where they can register to vote.

The project was just getting started — with about one patient a day registering to vote and about a dozen hospitals expressing an interest in the kiosks — when the pandemic struck. Emergency rooms filled with terrified people demanding tests. The iPad touch screens became a source of possible infections. Hospitals that had ordered kiosks stopped returning his calls.