Giving Compass' Take:

• Rebecca Onie shares how her experience working with low-income patients and their doctors inspired her to start Health Leads - a program that connects patients with the human services they need to keep them healthy. 

• What are the economic benefits of keeping people healthy? How can philanthropy help to scale this model up? 

• Learn more about human services' role in improving healthcare. 

So my freshman year of college I signed up for an internship in the housing unit at Greater Boston Legal Services. Showed up the first day ready to make coffee and photocopies, but was paired with this righteous, deeply inspired attorney named Jeff Purcell, who thrust me onto the front lines from the very first day.

And over the course of nine months I had the chance to have dozens of conversations with low-income families in Boston who would come in presenting with housing issues, but always had an underlying health issue. We had moms who would come in, daughter has asthma, wakes up covered in cockroaches every morning.

But over the course of these nine months, I grew frustrated with feeling like we were intervening too far downstream in the lives of our clients --that by the time they came to us, they were already in crisis.

So Health Leads was born of these conversations -- a simple model where doctors and nurses can prescribe nutritious food, heat in the winter and other basic resources for their patients the same way they prescribe medication. Patients then take their prescriptions to our desk in the clinic waiting room where we have a core of well-trained college student advocates who work side by side with these families to connect them out to the existing landscape of community resources.

Read the full article on a healthcare system kept us healthy by Rebecca Onie at TED.