One man’s trash, another man’s treasure: Olentangy students turn OhioHealth surplus into medical aid

POWELL — Five Olentangy Liberty High School students launched a medical supply redistribution network hoping to redirect a few thousand pounds of unused supplies in their first year.

Instead, OhioHealth handed them nearly 30,000 pounds of its remaining COVID-era surplus to figure out how to move.

The donation included 9,393 boxes of 3M N95 respirators and 20,736 reusable hot-and-cold therapy packs — about $250,000 worth of medical supplies, according to the students’ estimate.

Team lead Ben Kurian, 16, said they launched Project MedBridge in early 2026 after noticing a problem on opposite ends of the healthcare system: U.S. hospitals often have usable medical supplies they can no longer use, while under-resourced healthcare systems around the world lack basic medical materials.

The students quickly learned finding supplies was only the beginning. They would have to figure out how to move them, where to send them and how to turn a donation into medical aid.

Medical supplies are particularly vulnerable to waste because hospitals follow strict expiration rules, Kurian said. Even sealed, usable products can be discarded if a hospital doesn’t expect to use them before they expire.

The COVID-19 pandemic compounded the problem. Hospitals built large inventories of supplies such as N95 respirators, Kurian said, only to be left with excess inventory as demand declined.

Partnerships lead Arjun Pandya, 15, said people often assume that waste occurs because hospitals and health care systems are unwilling to donate their excess supplies.

“The reality is the majority of waste is created due to a lack of collaboration in the supply chain,” Pandya said. 

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

From one email to nearly 50 pallets

Project MedBridge’s connection with OhioHealth began in April, when Kurian reached out to Jean Halpin, president of Grant Medical Center.

The students were connected with Randy Moore and Amy McFarland, who handle emergency preparedness and supply-chain work at OhioHealth’s distribution center. A few days later, Moore told the students OhioHealth might have masks and thermal packs available.

McFarland, OhioHealth senior consultant for supply chain business relationships said in her 14 years at OhioHealth she has never experienced a surplus of medical supplies on this scale outside of the unique circumstances created by the pandemic.

“I was encouraged to learn there was an opportunity for these supplies to be utilized by organizations in need rather than being discarded,” McFarland said. “It is inspiring to see high school students demonstrate such a strong commitment to addressing both healthcare and environmental challenges.”

Their efforts to reduce waste, promote sustainability and ensure critical medical supplies reach organizations in need reflect exceptional initiative and community leadership, she added.

Operations lead Naman Soni, 17, said meeting McFarland from OhioHealth in person stood out to him after communicating with her for several weeks.

“She explained each donation and the real effect of each shipment was quite something. This was the moment that really showed Project MedBridge’s impact as a whole,” Soni said.

Technology lead Aayush Pande, 16, said until receiving the inventory from OhioHealth, Project MedBridge still felt relatively small.

“I had originally joined just to help Ben build the website. Then suddenly we were looking at thousands of boxes,” Pande said. “I remember realizing that this had become way bigger than the project I thought I was signing onto.”

After receiving a list of the inventory, the students quickly realized they faced a much larger challenge than simply accepting a donation.

Most of the N95s sat at a Cardinal Health facility in Groveport, while OhioHealth stored the remaining supplies at its distribution center in Columbus.

The students now had nearly 50 pallets and two truckloads to coordinate.

“I recall asking ChatGPT for some rough calculations, then looking up how big a pallet actually was because I couldn’t quite believe the scale of it,” Kurian said. “Once we realized what we were looking at, our group chat exploded.”

The celebration lasted about five minutes before the students turned their attention to a more immediate question: how to move everything.

Finding a place for the supplies

The search for a distribution partner proved more difficult than securing the supplies.

The students initially planned to work with Project C.U.R.E. and then spent weeks working with MATTER 360 before learning its warehouse had reached full capacity.

Kurian sent one more email while working at a startup in San Francisco. An hour later, Tanner Rowe, director of operations at Brother’s Brother Foundation in Pittsburgh, said the organization wanted to work with the students.

The foundation distributes donated medical supplies and equipment to hospitals and clinics worldwide.

“After months of dead end after dead end, that was the first real spark of hope that we might actually pull the shipment off,” Kurian said.

The students worked with Brother’s Brother Foundation to coordinate the freight through PLS Logistics Services for carrier and pickup.

The first pickup took place Aug. 4 at the Cardinal Health facility, where 29 pallets of N95s waited for the trucks.

The second pickup took place Aug. 6 at the OhioHealth Distribution Center, where the remaining N95s and hot/cold packs waited.

Kurian said they planned to use funding received from the 2026 Carnegie Young Leaders for Civic Preparedness class, where they were only one of two Ohio teams selected, to cover the shipping costs.

Rowe offered to have Brother’s Brother Foundation cover the freight, which allowed Project MedBridge to preserve its funding for future shipments.

(Story continues below. Photos from the pickup days. Provided by Project MedBridge.)

Building something that lasts beyond high school

The project also gives high school students interested in medicine a chance to tackle problems within the healthcare system.

“We didn’t really know what we were doing when this started, and no one told us who to call, what documents we needed or how to move 30,000 pounds of supplies,” Kurian said. “It really came down to figuring out the next problem as it came up.”

Kurian also noted their age helped them approach the project differently.

“We were willing to look a little stupid,” Kurian said. “We didn’t know a lot of the jargon or how supply chain works, so we asked really dumb questions and kept asking until we understood.”

That willingness also led people to help the students, Kurian said. People explained unfamiliar processes, made introductions and offered advice.

The students also saw firsthand that securing a donation represents only the beginning of the work.

Outreach lead Vahin Dubey, 16, said the donation marked a turning point for Project MedBridge.

“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,” Dubey said.

After earning a spot in the 2026 Carnegie Young Leaders for Civic Preparedness class, the program took Kurian to New Brunswick, where he met students from around the country working on civic projects.

“Meeting everyone made me want MedBridge to spread beyond just our team in Columbus,” Kurian said.

The team now works toward drafting a policy recommendation for the Columbus Board of Health that would require larger hospitals to create a process for diverting usable surplus rather than defaulting to disposal.

“If a hospital has usable surplus, there should already be a clear path for getting it somewhere it can still be used,” Kurian said. “The goal is for redistribution to become the norm, not the exception.”

He added they plan to hand the organization to younger students once they graduate.

The team has set a new goal of redirecting 100,000 pounds of medical supplies by the end of 2027.

“I think I used to imagine that people who accomplish really big things must know exactly what they’re doing from the beginning,” Kurian said.

“Between Carnegie and this shipment, I realized that a lot of the time they’re just figuring out the next problem in front of them.”