Dr. Meagan Oslund holds her Mobile Health Clinics Innovation Award, which recognizes an individual or organization that has made significant, innovative contributions to a mobile health program and the field.
Dr. Meagan Oslund, an occupational therapist who helps lead the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga College of Nursing’s MobileMOC, has received the 2026 Mobile Health Clinics Innovation Award from the Mobile Healthcare Association (MHA).
The award, announced at the MHA’s annual conference in Kansas City, Missouri, recognizes an individual or organization that has made significant, innovative contributions to a mobile health program and the field.
Oslund is an assistant professor of practice and interprofessional education and practice coordinator for MobileMOC. In her role with the mobile medical outreach clinic, she helps coordinate healthcare services and education for older adults and caregivers in 10 rural Southeast Tennessee counties, where provider shortages, limited transportation and distance can make access to care difficult.
She also brings UTC students from multiple disciplines into MobileMOC’s community-based care.
Oslund credited Dr. Kristi Wick, the Vicky B. Gregg Chair of Gerontology and a UC Foundation associate professor in the College of Nursing, with supporting her work.
“I truly could not have done this work without Kristi seeing a vision and letting me just kind of soar with it,” Oslund said. “I could not do this without the MobileMOC team, the faculty who supervise students and the students themselves. Students must be willing to try something new because a mobile clinic is not a traditional clinical setting.”
She also credited Dr. Erin Melhorn, an associate professor and doctoral capstone coordinator in the Department of Occupational Therapy, who mentored her while pursuing her doctorate at UTC.
Oslund joined UTC in 2025 after nearly four years as an occupational therapist at CHI Memorial Hospital. Melhorn, a member of the MobileMOC team, “encouraged me to pursue the UTC position,” Oslund said.
In the hospital setting, Oslund said she saw patients whose “lack of health education contributed to catastrophic events” and who then left the hospital with few resources. The experience, especially among older adults and people in rural areas, drew her to MobileMOC.
“When I learned about what MobileMOC was doing and how it was providing access to these rural communities, especially to older adults who didn’t have access to care, it really felt like something I was passionate about,” she said. “It was a true gap that I was seeing in the hospital.”
Since launching in April 2025, MobileMOC has served more than 3,100 patients through 350 clinic visits. The interprofessional program uses the Age-Friendly Health Systems 4Ms Framework—what matters, medication, mentation and mobility—to coordinate care and connect patients with services.
MobileMOC also provides students opportunities to learn together in the communities they will serve. Since its launch, 278 unique UTC students have completed 3,322 clinical or community hours through the mobile clinic.
Oslund said 11 professions are now involved with MobileMOC: nursing; social work; occupational therapy; nutrition and dietetics; chronic disease prevention; community health work; finance; Spanish; marketing; psychology; and medicine through a partnership with UT Health Science Center College of Medicine-Chattanooga.
“The students, at the end of the day, are why we do what we do,” Oslund said. “We’re kind of fueling them to be a workforce pipeline into rural jobs, but then also encouraging them to work with older adults.”
As principal investigator for a heart health initiative, Oslund has placed blood pressure kiosks in five senior centers, organized provider-community networking events, and led monthly health education activities at 12 rural clinic sites. MobileMOC uses data from its work to improve its model, including a customized electronic health record system and a closed-loop referral process.
In her nomination letter, Wick wrote that Oslund “has fundamentally changed what mobile healthcare looks like for older adults and caregivers across rural Southeast Tennessee.”
“Before Dr. Oslund’s involvement, the infrastructure to connect older adults across 10 rural counties to coordinated, consistent mobile care simply did not exist in this region,” Wick wrote. “In just one year, she has not only built that infrastructure but created a model others can learn from and replicate.”
In addition to faculty and students, Oslund said the work depends on community partners, senior center directors, and older adults and their caregivers. Moving forward, she is hoping to add full-time clinical faculty to MobileMOC, including an occupational therapist and a social worker.
“Hopefully, that’s what’s next for MobileMOC: having providers there consistently so that a student can go out there at any point and see what an OT or social worker does,” she said.
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