Owais Durrani, DO, a first-generation American whose parents immigrated from Pakistan, has experienced barriers to health care firsthand. His family didn’t have health insurance when he was growing up, and he remembers comparing himself—who had to prove he was “really sick” to see a physician—to his friends who readily visited the doctor for any ailments. Even at his young age, he recognized the inequity and wanted to understand why it was that way. That’s when his interest in health policy and access to care was born.

After double majoring in biology and political science, Dr. Durrani earned an internship at the White House and got to briefly work on some of the expansion acts of the Affordable Care Act. Inspired, he carried that problem-solver energy into medical school. His family had insurance for just two years when his father had a heart attack and needed open heart surgery. Dr. Durrani knew that if it had happened to his father just a few years earlier, it could have been catastrophic. Seeing how one law impacted his own family in such a positive way drove his passion for improving access to care. Above all, he wants to create positive change.

Beyond policy, which can take a long time to come to fruition, Dr. Durrani looks for other ways to help his patients. For example, he knows follow-up care is critical for many ED patients, but it can be challenging to find transportation to in-person care. Telehealth follow-ups are a great option, but many patients lack reliable internet. Now he works diligently to make sure his patients know about programs that subsidize internet costs and reduce that barrier to care. Dr. Durrani recently was on a committee at his hospital that discussed how to connect more patients to care, and these are the incremental changes that keep him motivated as the policy wheel turns very, very slowly.

An artistic image of Dr. Durrani. (Click to enlarge.)

Taking the time to connect those dots for his patients, going that extra mile, energizes him for the emotional toll of working the emergency department. He sees harsh realities every day on the job, and pushing for solutions gives Dr. Durrani an “extra burst of energy to, you know, really focus on this aspect of how medicine interacts with our society and practice.”

As a young physician, Dr. Durrani believes he is proactively staving off future burnout by being an advocate both in his hospital and on the federal level through his ACEP involvement. Every time he links underserved patients to better care, he remembers what he loves about his work. Certain moments, like when faces light up at the refugee clinic as they realize he speaks Pashto, also fuel his desire to be a voice for others.