JayDoc Community Clinic to celebrate 20 years of caring for underserved, providing clinical experiences
“It’s a win-win for all involved: the students, the medical school and the community," said alumna Jennifer Koontz, M.D., MPH, who helped launch JayDoc Community Clinic.

For Jennifer Koontz, M.D., MPH, it’s “super thrilling” to see that the JayDoc Community Clinic she helped start as a third-year medical student at KU School of Medicine-Wichita in 2005 is still making a difference in providing free health care to those with little or no insurance.
“I knew from the beginning that the idea made a lot of sense,” Koontz said. “It’s a win-win for all involved: the students, the medical school and the community.”
“In the student-run clinic environment, I can make a larger impact in the community, and I know that I’m helping someone in the moment while I’m there and they will leave hopefully in a better situation, even if it’s a little bit,” said Nazeen Morelli, the fourth-year medical student who is the clinic’s current executive director.
This February, the JayDoc Community Clinic will celebrate the 20th anniversary of its founding during an awards and fundraising banquet. Organizers of the Feb. 8 event at the Petroleum Club in downtown Wichita hope to raise at least $30,000 to support the expanding need for interpretation services for the clinic’s patients, most of whom are Spanish-speaking. The 2024 banquet, which had a $20,000 goal, raised $29,000 to support the interpretation services.
In 2024, 73% of the 491 patients who received care through the twice-weekly JayDoc Community Clinic were Spanish speaking, according to Morelli. Of the 484 patients seen in 2023, 315 or 65% were Spanish speaking.
The clinic is offered half-days on Saturday and on Monday evenings at Guadalupe Clinic, a nonprofit health clinic that has been the JayDoc clinic’s community partner since the beginning.
On average, about three to four interpreters are needed during the Saturday clinics, which meet at 940 S. St. Francis, and two to three interpreters are needed during the Monday clinics at 2825 S. Hillside, Morelli said.
‘Hungry for opportunities’
Now a faculty member with the Oregon Health & Science University, Richard “Rick” Moberly II, M.D., recalls that as a first-year medical student on the KU campus in Kansas City in the early 2000s, he was “hungry for opportunities” to help provide patient care.
That’s why he was excited to volunteer at the JayDoc Free Clinic that Koontz and a cadre of other students started near the KU Medical Center campus in Kansas City in 2003.
When Moberly came to KUSM-Wichita to complete his two years of medical school, he was ready to help Koontz, who also did her final two years at KUSM-W, replicate a similar clinic in Wichita.
“We definitely had a passion for community medicine … and delivering care for the underserved,” Moberly said as he recalled “a lot of meetings” to get the support of KUSM-Wichita faculty, who would advise and supervise the clinic, and find a community partner for the new clinic.
“From a clinical perspective, those were some of the first times where I was sitting down with patients and really understanding what was going on with them,” Moberly said. “For us, it was a time where we grew up medically and … those kinds of experiences to take on more clinical responsibilities are invaluable.”
His experience with the JayDoc Community Clinic also helped him learn how to work with community groups to deliver medical services to vulnerable populations. He’s used those skills on a global scale, helping build a hospital in Guatemala and forge a partnership with a medical school in Thailand.
Koontz echoed Moberly’s sentiments on how starting the clinic provided invaluable experiences.
“Understanding the health care needs of the underinsured and uninsured is important,” said Koontz, who has done medical service missions and now practices with the Newton Medical Center’s sports medicine clinic and is the team doctor for Bethel College athletics.
“For me, one of the most important things it taught me was the value of community partnerships and how much more power there is in forming those partnerships. If we hadn’t been able to find a community partner … it would have been a lot more challenging,” Koontz added.
Fortunately, when Koontz and other co-founders of the clinic met with administrators of the Guadalupe Clinic, “they saw it as a great way to deliver more care to people who needed it,” she said.
Clinic continues meeting need
Twenty years after the clinic’s founding, Morelli said the need has grown even more.
In the past several years, patient numbers have grown from 366 in 2020 to 415 in 2021 to 439 in 2022 to the upper 400s in 2023 and 2024.
“We’ve been working on our capacity to see patients,” said Morelli.
All medical and pharmacy students at KUSM-Wichita are eligible to volunteer at the clinic. In 2023, 150 medical students were involved with seeing patients; in 2024, 181 students, including 45 who are studying pharmacy, volunteered with the clinic.
Second- and third-year Wesley Family Medicine residents, which are supported by KUSM-Wichita, have helped increase the number of supervising faculty and community physicians available in the Saturday clinic, said Morelli.
For Morelli — who has volunteered with the JayDoc clinic since her first year at KUSM-Wichita and with a student-run clinic when she was a graduate student at Colorado University — providing care for the underserved has been “humbling,” she said.
“Taking care of patients and seeing how grateful they are for the care they receive is a highlight.”
Above, left: Jennifer Koontz, M.D., MPH, was one of the founders of the JayDoc Community Clinic in 2005.
Above, right: Nazeen Morelli, fourth-year medical student, is the JayDoc Community Clinic’s current executive director.
Support the clinic
Tickets for the Feb. 8 JayDoc Community Clinic awards and fundraising banquet are $100 per person and $800 for a table of eight. Event tickets are included in three sponsorship packages ranging from $500 to $2,500. Unused tickets from the sponsorship packages can be donated to provide complimentary tickets for KU School of Medicine-Wichita medical students to attend. Ticket details will be available on the JayDoc Fundraising Banquet page.