Barbara McAneny, former American Medical Association President, once said, “One requirement to advance health equity is to promote greater diversity among medical school applicants and enrollees.”
Medical students with disabilities—particularly women from Asian, Black and Hispanic backgrounds—face disproportionately high rates of discrimination during their education and professional training, according to an October 2025 study published by JAMA Network Open. Of 45,705 students who graduated from a U.S. accredited medical school between 2020 and 2022, only 3,863 of those students disclosed their disability. That’s only 8.5%.Although a majority of the medical students participating in the study were women (52.9%), the study’s findings show how disability status, along with minority racial identities, increase vulnerability to discrimination in academic medicine.
On July 31, 2026, however, Dr. Lisa Meeks, Clinical Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine, said that number has increased from that 8.5% to 14.6%. “I had started collecting this data in 2015, so I’ve been the one doing this kind of longitudinal look at it, and I will say I’m surprised by how much it’s grown,” she says, “But what makes me sad is that there are categories of disability that do not grow at all.”
Deaf and hard of hearing, mobility disabilities, and chronic illnesses are remaining stagnant, but more students are disclosing their disability. While disclosure is a personal decision since some may not feel comfortable doing so, Meeks said that the more people disclose, the better the landscape will be for everyone. “You had medical students who were saying, no, this is why I’m going into medicine, I’m passionate about X, because I have experiences as a patient,” she said.
As the founder and co-director of the Docs with Disabilities initiative, Meeks said she works with volunteer group leaders who are in charge of the many programs the initiative offers, including Women with Disabilities in Medicine. This program’s goal is to unite women with disabilities in medicine for mentorship, education, and support for success in health professions. “Docs [with Disabilities] really wants to be a valuable partner,” Meeks says, “We’re so lucky to be funded in a time when funding is being stripped from organizations that work on civil rights and civil liberties.”
From Patient to Provider
At New York University Langone Health, an integrated academic health system including the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, Dr. John Ross Rizzo, Deputy Director of the Institute for Excellence in Health Equity, is helping keep up the momentum for accessibility and inclusion in health professions. Rizzo, who was born with an inherited retinal disease and has been legally blind for the last 25 years, was told by his colleagues, friends, and family that he shouldn’t pursue medicine. “Fortunately, I’m obstinate, ” he said.
Rizzo completed his graduate medical education at NYU, focusing his work within the physiatry space (the disability medicine field). As he developed more professional experience and his lab gained a larger reputation, Rizzo took a step back and looked around. Something was missing. “I realized that I was suddenly very isolated, and I felt alone. I didn’t know one other person at NYU Langone Health that was using a white cane,” he said. “And that was disheartening for me.”
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 protects the rights of persons with handicaps in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance. All public and private schools that receive federal funding are required under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act to make their programs accessible to students with disabilities.
At NYU, Rizzo knew there were only two options. He could complain about the change he wanted to see in the world or make himself a part of that change.He chose the latter, speaking to leaders at NYU about the advantages of a disability inclusion program. Five years later, the school decided to invest in it for the first time. “This was a genuine interest and authentic interest in trying to build support and infrastructure for disability inclusion and accessibility at an enterprise level,” Rizzo said. “I feel very privileged to sort of serve as really one of the first of its kind in academic medical centers.” Adapting those resources for an academic medical center proved difficult for the first six to 12 months, but the real missing piece was thinking about the clinical services and how to be more inclusive to students and trainees. “We developed a strategic roadmap, which we sort of used as our North Star over the last few years, which we think is very comprehensive,” Rizzo said. “And things have gone gangbusters, you know, happy to report.”
When it comes to patients with disabilities receiving medical and rehabilitation care, still many barriers exist, such as navigating a crowded, inaccessible waiting room, which Rizzo has experienced both as a patient and a clinician. “As someone with a very complicated inherited retinal disease with all sorts of additional eye comorbidities, I haven’t been to the eye doctor in five years. Why haven’t I been there in five years? Because I find it very difficult to deal with such a tumultuous environment,” he said. “I would show up for work and I would have to sort of walk through a gauntlet of assistive devices in order to get to my office because they were sort of riddled around the elevator bay and the waiting room. And, I said, this is just not right. It’s not what we should do.” Rizzo and his team piloted one of their rehabilitation clinics, retrofitting over a dozen waiting rooms to be more accessible and welcoming to patients with disabilities. The most exciting part, he recounted, was how everyone, including patients and staff, saw and understood the value of it all.
Teaching All Medical Students About Disability
In his other role as Associate Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at NYU, Rizzo said when it comes to teaching his students about disability equity in healthcare, he speaks to the Disability Equity Collaborative, started five years ago by his colleague Dr. Megan Morris, Vice Chair of Research for the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine. With four different workgroups, the collaborative’s goal is to empower and support healthcare organizations, practitioners, and policy makers in implementing evidence-based, accessible care for their patients with disabilities, and to enact policies that ensure that patients with disabilities will receive equitable healthcare. “Out of our Guidelines and Standards work group, we recently released the first implementation guide for health systems and hospitals and clinics on how to implement accessible health care at their organization,” she said. Yet the cornerstone of the collaborative is the DEC Leaders Workgroup where disability coordinators across 50 healthcare systems meet regularly to share what they’re working on and support each other in their initiatives to improve the accessibility of care.
“There’s still the assumption that disability is something we don’t talk about, and so really we need to be focusing on training our staff on how to ask questions and how to be comfortable asking it,” she said.
At the University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine, Meeks currently teaches the course, Disability in Medicine, which focuses on the landscape of inclusion and exclusion in medical education and health professions. She said that students who are entering healthcareprofessions and research gain a better understanding of ableism, which can help dismantle ableism in professional settings through education and normalization. Meeks also references the Disability Justice framework, which examines disability and ableism as it relates to other forms of discrimination based on identities like race and gender. “It is truly a multi-layered, multi-moving system to try to change the way people see disability and it takes a lot of things moving at the same time,” Meeks said.
While a lot of progress for disability inclusion has been made at UIC and NYU campuses, like all progress, it takes time.
“I’m thrilled that we’re looking at ways to expand our work through that enterprise accessibility lens and chasing after even more ambitious health equity goals, so we’re not losing sight of our mission work in accessibility, but we’re adding to it,” Rizzo said. “It’s been really a privilege of a lifetime.”
About the Author: Shelby Carter is a fellow with The Loreen Arbus Accessibility is Fundamental Program, a fellowship created with Women’s eNews to train women with disabilities as professional journalists so that they may write, research and report on the most crucial issues impacting the disabilities community.
