Doctors Making a Difference: Daniel Low, MD
For Daniel Low, MD, a family medicine physician at HealthPoint in Renton, providing healthcare means much more than seeing patients on a daily basis: It also means confronting the structural challenges that cause patients to need care in the first place and addressing equity in the healthcare workforce. Dr. Low talked with WSMA Reports about his work outside the exam room.
WSMA Reports: What drove you to get involved with advocacy?
Dr. Low: When someone suddenly falls ill, or is confronted with a health emergency, there is a tendency to ask, “why?” Why did this calamity befall an innocent person? My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer in her mid 40s, when I was in high school. I, too, asked the question “why?” But as I saw my mom endure chemotherapy and radiation, the question took on new meaning: Why did my mom have access to some of the best medical care in the world for breast cancer?
When I later began pursuing a career in health and medicine, I felt it was essential to be engaged with advocacy and health policy because I didn’t want to just answer the question of why an individual develops a disease, I wanted to know what could be done to ensure all people, including those most marginalized, receive the benefits of the latest medical advances.
As a community health center physician, I am responsible for ensuring the health of the entire community. While one-on-one interactions with patients are critical in building trust and meaningful in helping shape health outcomes, they are fundamentally limited in scope; I only see so many patients per day. If we want transformational change that improves health, we need to think structurally, beyond the individuals in front of us. I need to ask not only what brought this patient to clinic to discuss her diabetes, but what contributed to the environment that led to her diagnosis of diabetes? What can be done so her children, and her children’s children, don’t face the same conditions that resulted in chronic disease? I am involved with physician advocacy and health policy because I want my impact to stretch beyond the patient in front of me, to help cultivate healthy environments for future generations to come.
I believe our work as physicians is sacred, and at its core, a reflection of our ethics. Where we choose to work and who we choose to treat is a mirror of who we don’t treat, who doesn’t have access to care. Knowing this, I feel it is my obligation to engage in advocacy and the health policies that can improve the lives of my patients and further health equity.
Q: Has working at a community health center informed your advocacy?
I want to engage in the issues that most impact the communities I serve. To do that, we have to be present and humbly listen to our patients, to learn what challenges they are facing day to day and to understand the barriers that limit their agency and capacity. I advocated for free tax assistance at our clinic, through a partnership with United Way King County, so that our patients could claim tax credits through both the federal earned income tax credit program and the Washington State Working Families Tax Credit. In forming this partnership just a few years ago, we’ve already saved our patients over $100,000. A patient of mine-a single mother of three who works two jobs-was able to get ahead on rent, buy more nutritious food for her kids, and purchase a soccer ball for them so they could get outside and play more. These funds have helped ensure other patients can afford medication, and it has helped reduce the constant stress related to financial insecurity.
Working with patients experiencing homelessness is what pushed me to write a resolution several years ago at the WSMA, identifying chronic homelessness as a public health crisis, and work with Rep. Frank Chopp in Olympia to secure tens of millions of dollars for supportive housing and linking clinics to housing resources. My patients are so resilient, and when they share their vulnerabilities with me, I want to help problem-solve. Sometimes this is simply providing empathic reassurance, and sometimes it is leveraging my positionality as a physician to create more structural change.
Q: Tell our readers a little about the HealthPoint Health Scholars Program that you founded.
The program started in 2021 as a collaboration between our school-based health center at Renton High School and our HealthPoint Renton clinic site. I have always been interested in education and know I wouldn’t be where I am today without countless mentors who encouraged and coached me along the way. I feel an imperative to serve as a similar mentor for others on their journeys. I also recognized that while we have many outstanding clinicians in our clinic at Renton, they don’t necessarily reflect the patients and communities we see; there are major disparities based on language, education, health literacy, race, and ethnicity. We know from research that patients who see themselves represented in their healthcare providers have better health outcomes. When I connected with our school-based clinic and spoke to students who expressed a desire to pursue a career in health and medicine, but didn’t know how to get there, I knew there was a void that we could help fill.
We built a curriculum focused on the principles of rightful presence and cooperative learning and focused on addressing the key issues cited in the literature that prevent underrepresented students from ultimately pursuing careers in healthcare-a lack of longitudinal mentorship, financial challenges, and academic rigor. The program aims to inspire students to pursue careers in health, instill confidence in them, provide concrete healthcare skills, develop professional skills, and provide them with a sense of belonging among peers and mentors.
While we started small, with a cohort of seven students at Renton High School, we have grown to three sites across south King County, serving over 30 students annually. This year we will also be launching our first virtual cohort. We have former scholars now in medical school and nursing school, and we’ve been recognized by HRSA for our innovation in workforce development.
Running the HealthPoint Health Scholars program is one of my greatest professional joys and is perhaps best exemplified through an email I received from a former scholar just before last Thanksgiving: “I am a former student who had the privilege of participating in the Health Point Health Scholar opportunity at Renton High School a few years ago. I wanted to reach out and express my gratitude for the incredible experience and the foundational skills I gained during my time in the program. I know this is well unexpected, but the knowledge and guidance I received have been instrumental in shaping my career path. I am currently a rising senior nursing student at Pacific Lutheran University and I often find myself applying the skills and principles I learned from HealthPoint in my studies and clinical practice. Time and again I’m always reminded how your program started my passion for healthcare and provided me with the confidence to pursue this rewarding field. I am excited about the future, and I owe a significant part of my journey to the support and education I received from you all! I would love to stay connected and share more about my experiences and return the same mentorship I received to the next cohort if possible!”
Q: How can health policy address workforce issues from a health equity perspective?
When we look at groups most underrepresented in medicine and ask students from those backgrounds directly what it would take for them to pursue a career in medicine, the answers are fairly straightforward: financial support, adequate academic preparation, mentorship, and a sense of belonging. Financially, we need to reduce the out-of-pocket cost of medical training; we won’t have low- or middle-income trainees if the financial barriers are too high. This requires federal and state-level investment and can be further buoyed by private partnerships and philanthropy.
Academically, we need to invest resources in underrepresented communities from a young age. Programs like Head Start ensure young kids from disadvantaged backgrounds start school on equal footing. Programs that provide universal school lunches help ensure all children are well nourished and prepared to learn while in school.
Ongoing mentorship and pipeline programs, like the HealthPoint Health Scholars program, can ensure students receive support throughout their educational journeys. But to get there, we also need more mentors, which also means thinking about how we incentivize mentorship. Academic centers can and should recognize mentorship as criteria for promotion, rather than relying almost exclusively on publications. When these activities are recognized, more and more physicians embrace mentoring younger trainees, and we see a greater sense of belonging. And finally, it requires those of us who have made it in medicine to reach back and lift others up, just as we were lifted by our own mentors.
Q: Do you have any advocacy priorities for the 2027 legislative session, or for this year’s WSMA House of Delegates?
For this year’s WSMA House of Delegates session I’m focused on a couple of issues. First, in alignment with my pipeline programming, I’m advocating for the WSMA to take on more of a leadership role in advancing opportunities for clinical shadowing among prospective medical students. The WSMA already plays an important role in supporting underrepresented students who are in medical training-through scholarship and mentorship-but is limited in its work further up the pipeline. Nearly all medical schools expect or require students to shadow to better understand the clinical careers they may pursue. And yet, many premedical students, particularly since COVID, are routinely dismissed by healthcare institutions when they seek shadowing opportunities. As a result, it’s often only students with connections and resources that find shadowing opportunities, which furthers many of the health inequities we are trying to combat. Along with Michelle Terry, we are asking for WSMA to take a leadership role in coordinating with healthcare institutions to streamline this process.
Additionally, I’m advocating for WSMA to address issues of excessive screentime use among children. It is a nearly daily occurrence that I see a young person for a well-child check and one of the parents’ top concerns is related to inattention and/or a lack of focus. When I ask about screen usage, I inevitably receive an embarrassed smile and a response of “too much.” As it turns out, much of that screen time is actually happening at school, with over 80% of kindergarteners using devices at school, despite limited to no evidence of their benefit.
Q: What would you say to other physicians who want to get involved in advocacy but don’t know where to start?
There’s no better time to start than now! Sometimes our insecurities prevent us from engaging; we feel that we aren’t the expert on a particular topic, or we don’t know where to start. This is totally normal, but as Voltaire cautioned, we must not let perfect be the enemy of the good. As physicians, we are blessed with connecting with patients from all types of backgrounds. In our polarized world, we’re uniquely privileged to hear and understand concerns that cross political and cultural boundaries. And despite trust in healthcare and institutions decreasing in recent years, physicians remain one of the most well-trusted professions out there. As a result, we are uniquely positioned to leverage our expertise and experience to create change that meaningfully improves our communities.
If you don’t know where to start, reach out to your county medical society, attend the WSMA House of Delegates Annual Meeting, or just start a conversation with a colleague about what advocacy might look like in our community. I like to remember Margaret Mead’s invocation: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Why not jump in and be part of that small group of thoughtful, committed citizens? Maybe we’ll end up changing the world.
This article was featured in the September/October 2026 issue of WSMA Reports, WSMA’s print magazine.