It’s new. It’s nonprofit. It provides patient education. It’s Anjna: A New Joint Nonprofit Approach to Patient Education.

Founded in May 2010 by Stanford undergraduates, Anjna is a student-run organization that develops and disseminates high-quality health education materials to free clinics around the Palo Alto area, as well as to other institutions across the country, including Cornell, Harvard and HEC Paris. The main focus is to establish health education infrastructure programs in free clinics where patients have one-on-one interactions with health educators.

Among its many programs and services, Anjna targets socioeconomically disadvantaged patients by providing health education materials, such as easy-to-read pamphlets in different languages, to areas where these materials are lacking. It strives to improve the treatment and prevention of diseases, including obesity, diabetes, hypertension, depression and other chronic illnesses.

Anjna began with a team of 15 members led by its founder and executive director Vineet Singal ’12 and Donovan Barfield ’12, the managing director. Singal first came up with the idea for the organization after taking a quarter off from Stanford to volunteer full-time at St. Vincent’s Free Clinic in Galveston, Texas.

Galveston’s community was suffering from a weak economy ever since Hurricane Ike, which forced many people in underserved populations to lose their health insurance and thus made them dependent on free clinics for treatment.

“I noticed how many people were suffering from diseases like diabetes and obesity and high blood pressure,” Singal said of his work in Galveston. “The worst part is that these diseases are preventable; there’s no reason why people should have to have them.”

In response to the lack of quality patient and health education infrastructure, Singal started a health education program at the clinic in Galveston by partnering with medical students who were working there. The program eventually became integrated into the clinic’s regular operation.

To date, Anjna works with 40 partner clinics around the country and has already received awards for its work from foundations such as DoSomething and Institute for the Future. In contrast to other patient education nonprofits, Anjna is the only nonprofit that develops, translates and provides consulting services specifically to free clinics.

Of the 40 clinics Anjna works with, most are located in Santa Clara County. Anjna’s next priority is to scale up so that it has a national presence.

“The future is to provide this service to free clinics nationwide,” Singal said. He hopes that Anjna will eventually reach underserved patients worldwide.

Barfield, Anjna’s managing director, said that building the organization took a summer of establishing the various disease teams within the organization and applying for grants.

“We’ve expanded in the span of about four months,” he said. “We have about 100 people within the organization, we’ve raised $3,000 to implement our project in local clinics, and so we’re really excited in seeing where we can go.”

Barfield has personal motivations for working with Anjna.

“I myself was raised in an underprivileged family,” he said, “so it’s really rewarding because growing up, I was involved and I have stories from my mom about going to free clinics…It’s like I’m giving back directly to a situation that I was once immersed in myself.”

Another key player in building and supporting Anjna is Dr. Tien-Wen Wiedmann, Anjna’s faculty advisor and a former professor in nuclear medicine at the School of Medicine. With experience as founder and president of H.E.L.P. for Kids, another nonprofit dedicated to youth education and development through partnership with public schools, Wiedmann has assisted the team with recruitment and has helped Anjna define exactly what it wants to accomplish.

“We want to make people rethink…the experience that a patient has when they go to a free clinic,” Barfield said. “It’s not just they come in, they get medicine, they leave. They come in, they get to see a doctor, and they get to sit down with somebody and talk about their problems.”

Wiedmann notes that one of the biggest problems in health education efforts is patients’ noncompliance with their doctors’ advice.

“If you don’t understand your own condition, you don’t do what the doctor says, mostly because you don’t understand what the doctor says…I personally think that education is very important, because if you really understand the material [and] what’s going on, you will actually be a participant in your treatment.”

Wiedmann doesn’t know whether patient education makes a difference in the long run, but in an analysis study on the efficacy of patient education in chronic diseases and obesity published in June 2010, researchers found that 50-80 percent of patients who received therapeutic patient education showed general improvement in health.

Still, one of the biggest obstacles for Anjna has been convincing larger health education nonprofits and fiscal sponsors that undergraduate students can accomplish this project. A great source of assistance has been the student body.

“The students have been awesome,” Singal said. “We’ve been blown away by the talent of the student body and how dedicated to a cause they have been.”