History of the USC Student-Run Clinic
In 2009, two Keck medical students, Hillel Bocian and Brian Cervenka (Class of 2013), had a vision for medical education: bringing health professional students from different disciplines to work together as care teams providing real patient care. With that vision and the guidance of Dr. Brian Prestwich at the USC-Eisner Family Medicine Center in Downtown Los Angeles, the USC Student-Run Clinic was born. The student leadership of the organization designed a clinic model and protocol from scratch over the summer of 2010.
Our model incorporates evidence-based elements of the Patient-Centered Medical Home with the goal of improving continuity of care, enhancing clinic efficiency, and maximizing student learning. Interprofessional teams composed of students from the schools of medicine, pharmacy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and physician assistant work together under the supervision of clinical medical students, residents, and USC faculty. This model exposes students to team-based care in a primary care setting early in their professional education. Students can spend ample time with patients, and as a result we can provide valuable preventive care screenings, health education, medication compliance education, and lifestyle modification that physicians may not be able to
do in a typical primary care visit.
From 2011-2013, SRC worked at the Urgent Care Center (UCC) under the Department of Emergency Medicine at LAC+USC Medical Center under the guidance of Dr. Jonathan Wagner and Dr. Sean Henderson. Our goal at the UCC was to divert non-critical patients from the ER and provide education about the medical home model and the importance of primary care services in health maintenance and prevention.
Since early 2014, we have begun volunteering at the John Wesley Community Health Center for Community Health (CCH). At CCH, our volunteers are exposed to a unique patient population- that of Los Angeles's Skid Row. And in 2015, we opened our Mobile Clinic at the Volunteers of America Men’s Shelter in Downtown Los Angeles. Most recently, we started the Student Run Clinic Wellness Program (SRCWP) at the Wellness Center located in the historic LAC+USC General Hospital in November 2019. We have also expanded the interprofessional teams to five professions in 2019 with the addition of physical therapy to SRCWP.
Together, our clinic sites provide SRC volunteers the challenge of adapting our clinical skills to patients with a wide range of socioeconomic and health obstacles, always with the goal of providing comprehensive, patient-centered care. We believe that our comprehensive services will have the greatest impact on those with the greatest need: the chronically ill, indigent, and underserved patients of the Los Angeles community.