By Claudia Tanner
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A young woman went without food while helping her family pay for her father’s Parkinson’s disease medication, New York City’s health commissioner told the crowd assembled at Newsweek’s AI Health Summit. Dr. Alister Martin said the case showed how financial pressures can become health problems.
The city’s health department is now exploring whether artificial intelligence could make it easier for people to apply for benefits such as food assistance.
Martin recalled treating the woman, who was in her early 20s, after she arrived at an emergency department with abdominal pain. “I’m thinking as I’m looking through the labs: Is it appendicitis? Does she have kidney stones? Does she have cholecystitis?” he said.
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The tests instead indicated starvation ketosis, which can occur when the body does not get enough food.
“This young 20-something-year-old was in my emergency department with abdominal pain because she hadn’t eaten,” Martin said.
When he spoke to her privately, Martin said the woman told him that her elderly father had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and the family was struggling with the additional cost of his medication.
“This is a new bill for us to have to stomach within the house, and we’ve had to make decisions,” Martin recalled her telling him.
Martin said the choice she had left unspoken was a stark one: help pay for her father’s medication or buy food for herself. “This is the reality of the American medical system as we see it in the ER right now,” he said.
Martin said the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is now exploring whether AI could make it easier for people to navigate assistance programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. He stressed that the work is at an early stage.
“One of the concrete things that we are exploring at the health department is to what extent can artificial intelligence help with the documentation burden, the sort of bureaucratic sludge of, for instance, filling out an application like a SNAP application,” he said.
“We’re looking at ways that AI can help to essentially cut through the red tape, and so we’re very early on in these explorations.”
Martin said health professionals do not have time to help patients complete applications for food assistance or find other support, while community health centers can be too constrained to address such needs.
The paperwork burden can have real consequences. A 2025 Urban Institute analysis found that one in eight working-age adults in families receiving SNAP had their benefits stopped or interrupted because they were unable to complete the recertification process on time.
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