Local High School Students Partner with OhioHealth to Give Medical Supplies a Second Life
Five local high school students are making an impact on the community by finding a new purpose for unused medical supplies. Their organization, Project MedBridge, is partnering with OhioHealth to redistribute 30,000 pounds of remaining COVID-era medical supplies to healthcare organizations all around the world.
The Olentangy Liberty High School students recognized a gap in the healthcare supply chain and saw an opportunity to give unused medical equipment a second life. This discovery led them to reach out to OhioHealth, where they connected with Jean Halpin, president of OhioHealth Grant Medical Center. Halpin responded to the students’ initial outreach and facilitated the connection with the system’s supply chain team.
“Glad you are doing this work. It saves the planet and helps others in our world,” Halpin told the Project MedBridge team.
That connection helped transform the students’ idea into a large-scale effort to redirect unused medical supplies to healthcare organizations that could use them.
“The supplies already existed, and the need already existed,” said Ben Kurian, team lead and junior at Olentangy Liberty High School. “What was missing was a way to connect the two.”
OhioHealth donated approximately $250,000 of medical supplies to Project MedBridge, including 9,393 boxes of 3M N95 respirator and 20,736 reusable hot-and-cold therapy packs. The supplies donated by OhioHealth are being distributed through Brother’s Brother Foundation, a Pittsburgh-based humanitarian organization that distributes medical supplies and equipment to hospitals worldwide.
“I was encouraged to learn there was an opportunity for these supplies to be utilized by organizations in need rather than being discarded,” Amy McFarland, OhioHealth senior consultant for supply chain, told the Delaware Source. “It is inspiring to see high school students demonstrate such a strong commitment to addressing both healthcare and environmental challenges.”
The students originally set a goal to collect around 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of medical supplies. With OhioHealth’s donation of more than 30,000 pounds the team quickly surpassed that goal and gained national recognition.
“At that point it wasn’t a hypothetical student project anymore. The biggest hospital system in our city was actually trusting us to figure out what happened next,” Vahin Dubey, outreach lead for Project MedBridge told the Delaware Source.
Project MedBridge was selected as one of 71 teams nationwide for the 2026 Carnegie Young Leaders for Civic Preparedness class. As one of only two Ohio teams selected, the students received $7,500 in funding, along with access to a national network for young leaders.
“Being in a room with young people from across the country who were already building serious projects in their communities made it very clear that age doesn’t have to determine the scale of a problem you can take on,” Ben Kurian said. “Not even a week later, we were back in Ohio moving a donation larger than anything we could’ve dreamed of.”
With Project MedBridge’s first donation complete, they have set a new goal of redirecting 100,000 pounds of supplies by the end of 2027.
“This is the first,” said Naman Soni, operations lead for Project MedBridge. “The next step is making sure our work doesn’t stop with just one hospital.”
