Huddled in a tucked-away conference room at Boston Medical Center (BMC) last Saturday, twenty undergraduate volunteers discussed how they could impact health care policy.

There were no four-color pens in sight. The group--whose members come from a wide range of concentrations--was not talking about medical school applications.

In yet another example of non-premed students becoming involved in health policy issues, the students--members of project HEALTH--were Planning how to improve housing conditions in low-income areas of Boston.

When Project HEALTH (Helping Empower And Lead Through Health), was founded by an undergraduate three years ago, it had 10 members. Now, it has more than 130 volunteers from Harvard and MIT and students at Emerson and Wheelock Colleges and Brown University are opening their own branches.

Yet Project HEALTH's growth is not an isolated event. Student interest in health-related issues outside of the traditional pre-med track has led to a groundswell of academic and extracurricular interest.

Exploring Policy in Health Care (EPIHC), a student group founded last year to help students explore careers in health policy, has grown from 50 students to more than 400.

Academic interest in health policy has peaked as well, with more courses and students interested in them.

Last, month, the Committee on Special Concentrations approved four sophomores' plans to create special concentrations in health policy.

Rebecca D. Onie '97-'98, who founded Project HEALTH during her second year at Harvard, says she thinks there is a need for more undergraduate courses in health policy.

"I wish there were more classes like that when I was an undergrad," she says. "Health policy has a lot of different meanings for people."

Health Care Changes

Many students, like Sara M. Nayeem '99, say their interest in health policy was sparked by President Clinton's efforts to create a national health care system. Recent threats to the traditional doctor-patient relationship have aroused their concerns even more.

"There's a lot of loss of the patient-doctor relationship," says Nayeem, a biology concentrator taking Economics 1435: "The Economics of Health Care" this semester. "There's a loss of independence and the kind of care patients will receive."

"Medicine has improved, and...what you're able to do as a physician has changed with the economics of health care," she said.

Last year, during a review session for Chem 7, four first-years tossed around the idea of studying medicine outside of the pre-med track. The students--Clay Ackerly '01, Noelle S. Sherber '01, Suise Besu '01 and Jamil K. Shamasdin '01--were all intrigued by health care issues and felt that courses like organic chemistry and physics missed the point.