Robert Perrson talks about the upcoming sports season with physician assistant Michael Talotta inside a mobile health van donated by BBF Global Relief.

Students at Northgate High School in Bellevue, Pennsylvania, will have an easier time signing up for after-school sports now that they’ve gotten their mandatory physicals out of the way. In June, staff from Allegheny Health Network’s (AHN) Pediatric Institute parked a mobile health van outside the school and provided affordable sports physicals to students who would have difficulty receiving them otherwise.

The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association requires all student-athletes to receive a physical exam before participating in after-school sports. But with some primary care physicians booked out months in advance, many students have difficulty scheduling an exam. For others, a lack of transportation or health insurance makes it difficult to receive an exam at all.

“Sometimes people don’t have access to bus routes, so I think transportation is a really big [barrier to healthcare] in the city of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County in general,” says Julianne Markovich, a program manager for AHN’s Pediatric Institute. “But also, the process to get set up with insurance is a little bit long and tedious and some people don’t go through it.”

BBF Global Relief donated a mobile health van to AHN to support the organization’s growing initiatives to provide high-quality healthcare in underserved communities throughout the Pittsburgh region. The van was unveiled at a ribbon-cutting ceremony held at BBF’s warehouse in April 2024.

Michael Talotta, an AHN physician assistant, conducted the physicals using the exam table inside the van.

“Unfortunately, there are students in the region who do not participate in sports just because sports physicals may be a barrier for them, and it’s just easier to not participate than it is to get the physical. By bringing the physical to them, we can really increase sports participation rates,” Talotta says.

According to Markovich, between 20 and 30 students at Northgate High School miss out on sports every year because they don’t receive a physical exam. At Baldwin-Whitehall High School, the site of another mobile health clinic AHN hosted earlier this year, that number is closer to 50 students. At both schools, more than half of the student body comes from economically disadvantaged families.

Students who don’t play sports miss out on more than just fun.

“Sports participation is important…[for kids] to grow their social network and to really feel like they’re fitting in with their peers, but there’s also the side of it medically, where we’re trying to increase exercise to curb childhood obesity and other health-related problems associated with sedentary lifestyles,” Talotta says.

The day-long clinic held at Northgate High School helped 30 students become eligible to play sports in the fall by providing the exam for $20—a more affordable price than the $75 it costs to receive the same exam at CVS.

In addition to providing sports physicals to local students, the mobile health van helped AHN’s healthcare workers conduct biometric screenings at Monroeville’s Community Day and Pittsburgh’s weekend-long Juneteenth celebration.

Colleen Labishak, a project coordinator at AHN, helped run the recent mobile health clinic at North Northgate High School. She says she wears a variety of administrative hats at AHN but has taken an interest in the mobile health clinics because they provide an opportunity to work directly with the community.

“We’re building our little relationship with these kids and the families. It’s building trust,” Labishak says.

The van has transformed the way AHN thinks about providing healthcare, according to Markovich.

“In a pediatric sense, I never thought [mobile health] was possible, I never knew it existed. So, when we got the van, it sparked a new innovative way to deliver healthcare, and I think it’s going to become so much more prevalent now that we have this van,” she says.

Markovich thanks BBF for helping AHN provide communities with a service that ”they may have never thought that they could have.”

Those services will likely expand as AHN’s mobile health program evolves. Markovich says the van has sparked attention from other organizations looking to collaborate on projects that bring more resources into Pittsburgh’s underserved communities.

“We all have the same end goal in mind—to increase the quality of life of our patients and communities,” Markovich says.