![]() ![]() “You are not doing any favors to your lungs with smoking,” she says. You really are making a difference.”Īs a cancer survivor’s daughter, Johnson now has a message to others who are still smoking or otherwise at high risk for lung cancer. Thank you to every single UConn student who has made a patient phone call. “A simple phone call can save so many lives,” Johnson says. I am so proud to be part of UConn Health Leaders.” ![]() I am so glad we started a lung cancer screening project and can help save people’s lives like Mr. Medolli’s success story is a great example of proactively identifying social determinants of health risk factors for lung cancer. “It’s hard to know over the phone if you are really making a difference or an impact on patient lives,” says Bellizzi. I’ve been thinking about her throughout lots of my dad’s doctor appointments, and lots of our tears and happy tears.” She adds: “I would love to give the premed student who called us a big hug, and a big thank you from our family. Because of the UConn students volunteering to make phone calls, my dad got to where he is today.” “We also want to say thank you to UConn Health. “We would love to share his story to help others high-risk for lung cancer to get screened,” she says. He is now cured,” after receiving robotic lung cancer surgery in April at Hartford Hospital to minimally invasively resect a part of his upper right lung to remove the cancer, Johnson says. Medolli’s family as part of the UConn Health Leaders Program’s new lung cancer screening project. But we’re very lucky they caught it early.” Sarah Bellizzi, 21, is the volunteer UConn Class of 2023 student who made the life changing phone call to Mr. “My dad’s lung screening test and his doctors at UConn Health determined he had Stage 1a lung cancer,” says daughter Johnson. She connected Medolli and his family to UConn Health’s Financial Services team to help him get the lung cancer screening test funding coverage he was in need of and entitled to as a longtime smoker at high risk. She hopes to apply and attend UConn School of Medicine to become a doctor. She just graduated in May with her Bachelor of Science in Physiology and Neurobiology. Sarah Bellizzi ’23 (CLAS) of Berlin was the UConn then-undergraduate who made the life changing call. The program’s goal is to intervene to help curb patient health inequities, as 80% of an individual’s health outcomes are influenced by one’s social determinants of health, which are day-to-day environmental factors such as economics, food insecurity, housing, and transportation. To help make a difference in the health of others, volunteer students in the UCHL program started calling him and other high-risk patients who hadn’t followed up yet to get their lung cancer screening scans to ask why not, and whether their answers had anything to do with unmet social determinants of health factors influencing their health care. This risk factor makes him high-risk for lung cancer. Her father, Pellumb Medolli, 71, of East Hartford, originally from Albania, has smoked cigarettes for more than 50 years. “And his three kids and four grandkids, too.” “That phone call was lifesaving for my Dad,” she says. It was a volunteer UConn premedical student calling from the UConn Health Leaders (UCHL) program to see if she could help her father in anyway. She almost didn’t pick it up just thinking it might be another telemarketer calling.īut she did pick up the call. Ojeda Johnson’s cell phone rang in early December. ![]()
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