Aida Winona Strom walked into a hospital room at Hennepin County Medical Center recently and faced an unhappy patient.

“I want the other advocate,” the man told her. “The guy with the glasses.”

Strom, HCMC’s American Indian patient advocate, calls the slight “awesome.”

“I loved it,” she said, and meant it.

That’s because Strom, 37, recruited the guy with the glasses — University of Minnesota nursing student Frank Johnson Jr. — as well as five other nursing and social work students from the U and Augsburg College.

With school out for the summer, the six volunteer patient advocates have just wrapped up a one-year pilot program at HCMC that is improving the health outcomes of American Indian patients there. These patients’ medical conditions often are long-standing and complex, from kidney failure to diabetes to a new and alarming increase in opiate abuse, particularly among American Indian women.