Twelve IU students will travel to Knoxville, Tennessee, on Friday to help provide free medical care through Remote Area Medical at IU, a local chapter of the nonprofit that provides free medical care through pop-up clinics across the nation.
Founded in 1985 by TV star and philanthropist Stan Brock, RAM provides services including vision, dental and general medical care. RAM volunteer coordinator Natasha Tracy said RAM has undergraduate chapters at approximately 50 colleges, whose undergraduate volunteers take trips to facilitate pop-up clinics and assist medical professionals in providing care.
“They're doing everything from checking patients in and helping enter paperwork, to dental sterilization and preparing equipment for dentists or eye doctors,” Tracy said.
RAM at IU, formerly Hoosier Health Advocates, has operated as an official RAM chapter since May of 2024. Trip coordinator Morgan Guthrie said the club made that transition because of the experiences of individual club members who volunteered with RAM.
“Before we were a RAM chapter, we would still send people to clinics,” Guthrie said. “Our group members learned a lot from them."
Club president Praveen Chirumamilla, a senior majoring in neuroscience on the pre-med track, said he helped spearhead the transition after volunteering with RAM as a freshman and sophomore. He was motivated to bring RAM to IU by his own experiences volunteering, which he said shifted how he thought about his career.
“I went on my first trip when I was a sophomore, and I just thought it'd be a really cool experience, but it ended up being super influential,” Chirumamilla said.
As a sophomore, Chirumamilla went with RAM to a rural area near Cleveland, where he and the other volunteers worked with patients who went years without access to health care.
Other times, Chirumamilla said he’s seen patients drive almost 12 hours to receive medical care at a RAM pop-up clinic.
“I was in Tennessee, and I saw this family of four, and they had literally driven all through the night from Texas in a truck,” Chirumamilla said. “You could kind of see, like, the fright and fear on their faces walking in. They weren't sure if everything was going to be okay.”
According to Tracy, RAM clinics partner with community leaders to coordinate visits in areas with a high need for medical care. Its stated purpose is to improve health care conditions for the “impoverished, isolated, and underserved.” The organization requires no ID or insurance.
RAM often visits rural areas like Appalachia, where factors including a lack of health care professionals contribute to higher mortality rates in rural or economically disadvantaged areas. In 2017, a RAM clinic in the Virginia mountains drew more than 2,000 people from surrounding Appalachia in need of care.
But RAM also frequently hosts clinics in urban areas, where many patients lack access to regular healthcare due to financial or legal barriers rather than geographic ones.
“I think at the heart of it, it's RAM, it kind of is like a band aid on the system,” Chirumamilla said. “I think it kind of does go without saying that healthcare is kind of broken with America. But the really beautiful thing about RAM is that it's able to help all these people.”
In addition to RAM trips, the club also partners with organizations providing healthcare in the Bloomington area, including Indiana Recovery Alliance, SouthernCare Hospice, Beacon’s Shalom Community Center and Tandem Community Birth Center and Postpartum House.
Like RAM, these organizations seek to fill areas where there is a need for affordable health care.
For students approaching careers in the medical world, Chirumamilla said volunteering with organizations like these can provide first-hand experience and understanding of the health disparities that they may encounter as medical professionals.
“Whether they're volunteering or they're still in school, they're at least cognizant of these like disparities that are going on and also recognize that they have the power within them to have compassion and care towards these people,” Chirumamilla said.
