Health Insurance Scholar Program

The mission of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine Health Insurance Scholar Program is to educate our peers about the mechanics, impacts, and limitations of health insurance, as well as how to best care for our patients in this context, and how to protect
ourselves as future healthcare providers.

This program is available to all students at both the Winston-Salem and Charlotte locations, or those on away rotations, who are currently enrolled in any of the following programs: MD, PA, Academic Nursing, or Biomedical Sciences. 

Program Objectives

We would like for our participants to be able to define basic vocabulary related to health insurance (such as deductible, copay, coinsurance, etc.), and understand the different insurance modalities such as private health insurance vs. Medicare/Medicaid, how to care for uninsured patients and who takes on those costs, how to protect yourself as a healthcare professional with malpractice insurance, rules and regulations around health insurance and how the hospital/private practice complies to those rules, and many more measurable outcomes that will be assessed using our pre- and post-program surveys.

Our overall goal is to provide a resource to help students to get a better sense of understanding regarding health insurance and feel confident in finding optimal treatment options for future patients to further the patient-provider relationship and encourage treatment compliance.

Program Requirements

• Individuals must complete 6 workshops out of the 10 offered, all of which are 1 hour in duration.
• Individuals must also complete a capstone project that consists of a PowerPoint presentation
  (template provided to them) in which they present a difficult case study around an insurance
  topic discussed within the program.  

Student Leadership