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Inequities in the health care system are pervasive, and for individuals, sometimes solving one problem simply opens up new ones. Amanda Koffink has been engaged with health systems for years, and she’s seen firsthand how the system fails those who are already most vulnerable. So in her work and outside it, Amanda helps people access the resources they need, and she’s passionate about building connections in her community to increase that access.

Amanda’s engagement with health systems began when she was still in high school, when she volunteered with the Samaritans suicide hotline. The experience stuck with her, and she wanted to explore a career in mental health. So in college, Amanda worked at McLean Hospital and at Cambridge Eating Disorder Center. The whole time, though, there was a consistent problem Amanda noticed: people would be discharged before meeting treatment goals, or wouldn’t be admitted in the first place, because their insurance wouldn’t cover the treatment they needed. 

“I was really passionate about approaching health care from the perspective of getting access to what people need,” Amanda says. After graduation, she pursued this passion by working with Health Care For All of Massachusetts. Her job is to enroll people in Mass Health; but in reality, her work goes far beyond simple enrollment. “I see such a wide variety of different issues related to accessing healthcare that I end up supporting people in other areas,” she says. This ranges from helping find language-accessible doctors, to discussing medical debt, to troubleshooting insurance coverage.

One of the most serious issues Amanda has seen at Health Care For All of Massachusetts is language access, and that’s why she recently started a second job as a Spanish language interpreter at Mass Eye and Ear. “I’ve seen it [lack of language access] shorten people’s life spans,” she says. She’s seen how just having insurance doesn’t guarantee access to care if someone can’t find a doctor who speaks their language or has an interpreter. Amanda is working to address these systemic issues where she can, but she’s also interested in exploring larger change, and that brought her to GenUnity.

When Amanda heard about GenUnity, it seemed like a perfect fit. She wanted to explore these systems she always navigates, and “to be surrounded by other people working in this space who are dedicated to doing the same work and care about the same things I do.” And the relationships she made in the cohort have already had tangible impacts on her work. She’s collaborated with fellow cohort members to connect her clients to resources that she previously didn’t have access to, including clearing thousands of dollars of medical debt for a client. Additionally, meeting Community Partners helped her “make connections that allowed [her] to further [her] power to make change in [her] own job.” This included conversations with people working at Mass Health, whom she usually only engages with professionally. It was powerful “to hear that in a different setting, to sit next to them and say I’m so frustrated with this too.”

Amanda wants to keep tackling the systemic issues she deals with on a daily basis. One major barrier to language access is outdated provider directories, and so Amanda is working on a software to streamline the updating process for insurers. In GenUnity’s Impact Incubator, she’ll develop an action plan for insurers to implement her software. In all her work, Amanda has always helped people who most need it find access to care, and that is the work she will continue doing.

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