{"id":278587,"date":"2026-06-26T02:22:46","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T02:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/278587\/"},"modified":"2026-06-26T02:22:46","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T02:22:46","slug":"nyc-health-commissioner-brings-record-of-civic-innovation-focused-on-health-inequities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/278587\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC health commissioner brings record of civic innovation focused on health inequities"},"content":{"rendered":"

Public health, explained: Sign up to receive Healthbeat\u2019s free New York City newsletter here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Before becoming New York City\u2019s top health official in February, Dr. Alister Martin juggled being a busy emergency room doctor in a Boston hospital and an entrepreneur focused on remedying inequities in public health. <\/p>\n

One widely adopted initiative of his, Vot-ER, introduced the novel idea of registering patients as voters in a healthcare setting. <\/p>\n

Martin recently told a group of health policy leaders in Manhattan that his philosophy is simple: \u201cIn this country, if you\u2019re not at the table politically, you\u2019re on the menu.\u201d <\/p>\n

In some ways, Martin was an unusual choice for the commissioner of the city\u2019s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene<\/a>. The nonprofit he founded to oversee the voter registration startup employs a staff of fewer than 60. In his new role, he oversees more than 7,000 employees across the city\u2019s five boroughs.<\/p>\n

Much like Mayor Zohran Mamdani, his 34-year-old boss, Martin at age 37 is a relative political outsider with an interest in tackling the challenges faced by underserved communities and leveraging his position to increase civic participation. In Martin\u2019s case, he used his skills and access as a physician to do that by building startups with a social justice agenda, such as Vot-ER, and collaborating on journal articles arguing for doctors to encourage their patients to vote. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think that might have been one of the reasons Dr. Martin might have appealed to the mayor, despite the fact that he didn\u2019t really have a direct New York City health experience or New York City government experience before he was appointed as the commissioner,\u201d said Jean Bae, a professor at New York University\u2019s School of Global Public Health who has worked as a policy analyst at the city\u2019s health department.<\/p>\n

Martin launched Vot-ER as a nonprofit in 2019, built around the idea that civic engagement can improve the overall health and well-being of patients. The group enlists volunteer doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals to ask patients about their voter registration status. If the patients aren\u2019t registered, they are encouraged to scan a QR code worn by the doctor or nurse and enter their personal information, after which they receive notices of their nearest voting center or reminders prompting them to register. They can also request an absentee ballot.<\/p>\n

The effort has received support from those in the medical establishment who champion the need for civic participation in unconventional corners. According to Vot-ER, more than 2,000 healthcare institutions have registered to use its tools, like the voter registration app. Vot-ER also says it has helped more than 650,000 people<\/a> by showing their closest voting center and sending reminders to register.<\/p>\n

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Some observers of the program, however, have questioned the ethics of mixing civic activism with medical care. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere shouldn\u2019t be anything going on there except efforts to maintain or improve the patient\u2019s health,\u201d said Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University\u2019s Grossman School of Medicine. <\/p>\n

Conservative groups have accused Vot-ER of bringing politics into healthcare settings. The Republican National Committee sent letters in 2024 to the secretaries of six swing states urging them to monitor Vot-ER, citing what it saw as the group \u201cweaponizing the healthcare system\u2026 across the nation for partisan political purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vot-ER officials defend their work as \u201crigorously nonpartisan.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Dr.New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, right, announces Dr. Alister Martin, left, as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene at the Bronx Museum of the Arts on Jan. 31, 2026. (Michael Appleton \/ Mayoral Photography Office) <\/p>\n

Registering voters has become a crowded field. Taylor Swift has encouraged her millions of social media followers to register to vote with the click of an Instagram post. Republicans held registration drives at gas stations in the 2022 midterm elections to stress the rising cost of living.<\/p>\n

Though Martin stepped away from Vot-ER in February when he became health commissioner, the program may offer clues on how he might lead one of the biggest health agencies in the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cI learned so much through the Vot-ER era of my life,\u201d Martin said in a recent interview at the health department\u2019s headquarters in Long Island City, Queens.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I want is for someone to have their life be meaningfully different because of the action that we took. That\u2019s going to look a little different than maybe how other health commissioners have intervened, but that\u2019s what I think public health needs to move toward \u2014 meaningfully \u2014 to impacting people\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Martin\u2019s ventures burnished his reputation as civic innovator<\/p>\n

Born in New York City, Martin grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Rutgers, where he played on the tennis team. He later earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School, while also getting a master\u2019s from the Harvard Kennedy School. <\/p>\n

\u201cAlister in grad school was someone who was absolutely hungry to learn and understand how the world works and how power works, how to navigate organizations and systems,\u201d said Tim McDonald, a close friend who met Martin at the Kennedy School and became roommates with him. <\/p>\n

After graduation, Martin put those skills into practice, launching several health-related startups while working in a hospital. In 2016, Martin developed the first of several startups: an AI tool that helped healthcare providers take notes. Later, he came up with an idea to deliver COVID-19 vaccines during the thick of the pandemic to elderly and disabled residents in some of the low-income neighborhoods of Boston. <\/p>\n

In 2017, when Martin was chief resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, he noticed that many of his ER patients were struggling with homelessness, opioid addiction, and poverty \u2014 all issues that shape health outcomes. Voting, he realized, could help change such circumstances to possibly prevent future emergency room visits.<\/p>\n

After starting Vot-ER in 2019, he continued working on voting rights issues as an adviser in 2021 and 2022 to then-Vice President Kamala Harris; later he joined the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services advisory panel on outreach and education. <\/p>\n

The idea of registering voters in a medical setting took on even greater importance after thinking about the Department of Motor Vehicles, which began offering voter registration in 1993 with the National Voter Registration Act, known as the Motor Voter law. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat the hell does voting have to do with driving? Aren\u2019t voting and health more related than voting and driving?\u201d Martin recounted in a 2023 story in ACEP Now<\/a>, a publication of the American College of Emergency Physicians. \u201cWe want to create that same kind of connection between health and voting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vot-ER started as an iPad on a kiosk in the waiting room of the emergency department at Massachusetts General<\/a>. Martin got permission from hospital administrators and agreed to keep the effort nonpartisan and not compromise care. He expanded by installing software on iPads affixed to lecterns he had bought online, according to a 2020 story in The New York Times<\/a>. <\/p>\n

In 2020, during the COVID outbreak, the group shifted its focus from emergency rooms and more broadly toward academic medical centers and community health clinics. <\/p>\n

Sandra Pimentel, a clinical psychologist and professor at the Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, set up Vot-ER tables in hospital lobbies to greet visitors.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was saying, \u2018Hey, are you registered to vote? Are you sure? Here\u2019s how to do it. It\u2019s very simple,\u2019\u201d Pimentel recounted from her early days volunteering with Vot-ER. <\/p>\n

In some hospitals, Vot-ER offers guidance on how best to approach patients. A Vot-ER training video<\/a> offers suggestions. <\/p>\n

\u201cOne way to introduce these tools to patients is during the social history portion of their visit. While asking other questions, such as, \u2018do you smoke, do you drink, are you safe at home?\u2019\u201d Vot-ER Senior Field Director Bianca Navarro said in a training video. \u201cYou could add, also, \u2018are you registered to vote?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

If the answer is no, the patient is urged to use their smartphone to scan a QR code on a badge provided by the health professional. Clicking on the code, the patient\u2019s smartphone opens to a page and is invited to enter their name, date of birth, and residential address. The app determines the voter\u2019s eligibility by checking with a national database of registered voters.<\/p>\n

How voting enters healthcare relationship<\/p>\n

Vot-ER staff have described its interaction with patients as \u201cstreamlined.\u201d <\/a><\/p>\n

Bianca Navarro of Vot-ER wrote in an email that asking a patient if they are registered to vote takes less than two minutes. \u201cHealthcare professionals who participate in our work also report reduced burnout and increased hopefulness. This work strengthens the provider-patient relationship rather than detracting from it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sally Satel, a Yale-affiliated psychiatrist and resident scholar at the center-right American Enterprise Institute, argued that the trust patients place in doctors is precisely what Vot-ER threatens to exploit, and that physicians are \u201cguardians of physical, not civic, health.\u201d She said if a doctor raises the subject of voting patients may suspect an ulterior motive and worry that their care could be affected by how they respond.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is completely inappropriate for a physician to bring partisan politics directly into patient care,\u201d Satel said in an email. \u201cEven broaching the issue of voting itself in a patient visit is a bizarre distraction from the true issue \u2014 the health of the patient.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Jennifer Caputo-Seidler is an internist and professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida, who learned about Vot-ER on social media because she was interested in advocacy and medicine and became a Vot-ER fellow.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe number one question I always get is like, \u2018Do patients give you pushback?\u2019 said Caputo-Seidler. \u201cI\u2019ve never had an upset or angry response from a patient.\u201d <\/p>\n

The aim is for Vot-ER volunteers to add questions about voter registration status along with the other standard questions they ask patients during an annual check up.<\/p>\n

\u201cTheir drug use, their sexual habits, what their bowel movements look like,\u201d Caputo-Seidler said. \u201cAsking somebody if they\u2019re registered to vote is by far not the most invasive question I\u2019m asking them.\u201d <\/p>\n

If she were to receive a testy response, she said she would move on. <\/p>\n

Vot-ER is gearing up for the 2026 midterms, while Martin has officially left the startup and is turning his attention to his new job. <\/p>\n

Martin told Healthbeat he didn\u2019t think the voter initiative played a major role in his winning over Mamdani. It was his interest in focusing on the broader question of affordability and trying to help a patient, for example, who has diabetes but no refrigerator for the insulin, he believes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know if the mayor knew about Vot-ER \u2014 maybe he did, maybe he didn\u2019t \u2014 that\u2019s certainly not what our conversations were about,\u201d Martin said. <\/p>\n

Martin said that his work has aimed to address financial instability in the lives of his patients. \u201cUltimately what the data shows us is that it\u2019s poverty that makes people sick.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trenton Daniel<\/a> is a reporter covering public health in New York for Healthbeat. Contact Trenton at tdaniel@healthbeat.org or on the messaging app Signal<\/a> at trentondaniel.88.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Public health, explained: Sign up to receive Healthbeat\u2019s free New York City newsletter here. Before becoming New York…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278588,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[52964,4134,44321,9,24,56,63,65,64,82],"class_list":["post-278587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-dr-alister-martin","tag-health-commissioner","tag-healthbeat","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278587\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}