Oakland, CA filmmaker Pete Nicks always has an eye out for his next project. So when his wife, a speech pathologist, would come home at night and tell him about the people she worked with at Oakland’s Highland Hospital, he was struck by the stories of uninsured people he wasn’t hearing in the debate on health care.

“They were dealing on a daily basis with all these things that had nothing to do with their health,” Nicks said. “They would come long distances to see her and not have bus fare to get home and some would have to walk back. You hear about what people go through who are living really hard lives.”

Siezed with an idea of doing a documentary about access to healthcare, Nicks began the long process of getting access to film at the hospital, which has one of the busiest emergency rooms in Oakland.

“I had a strong feeling there was an important story to be told here about the health care debate,” he said. “We’ve all seen drams on TV about hospitals like ‘ER’ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ that focus on trauma and the emergency room and the residents’ lives and not so much the patients. What we’re doing is using an institution to examine the community.”

During a meeting with Pentagram Design, a partner on the project, Nicks and the designers came up with the idea of focusing on the waiting room at the hospital, where people have a lot of time on their hands and a lot of stories to share.

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“There are Hell’s Angels sitting next to Afghan immigrants sitting next to a prim and proper Dutch couple,” Nicks said about Highland’s waiting room. “It’s a storytelling Mecca.”

Nicks decided to branch out beyond the movie in telling those stories. Along with the feature length documentary, there’s a Waiting Room blog, and there will be an interactive booth in the waiting room and ways for people to use social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, to share their stories and to hear others, in hopes of lessening people’s isolation. The storytelling kiosk will eventually link up with similar ones in waiting rooms around the country.

Reaching out on all these levels makes the project groundbreaking, says Wendy Levy, the director of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Producers Institute for New Media Technologies at the Bay Area Video Coalition. Nicks and his team were selected as one of eight to participate in this institute.

Highland Hospital Volunteer Lucy Ogbu talks about her desire to help communities in need and her dream of becoming a doctor.

“They’re looking for filmmakers using new media as tools for social change,” Levy says about the funders. “Pete’s project is story driven and trying to create tools where the community can participate in its own healing.”

Hearing from the uninsured is a vital part of the health care debate, Levy says.

“It’s a radical act to talk to people who are sitting in a waiting room, people who are traditionally silent,” Levy said. “Finally someone is saying ‘What’s going on?’ and providing a pathway for these stories to get to other people in the same situation and to medical professional and to lawmakers.”

Some of the people telling their stories on the blog include a hospital volunteer from Nigeria talking about her fierce commitment to being a doctor, a man with his three young sons who has been waiting all day for his wife to get treated for her diabetes, and two friends talking about the “carnival of humanity” that makes for good people watching at Highland. They offer tips like bringing a book and not sitting in a certain spot. One of them also talks about it being a humbling experience to wait. “We all need help,” he says. “That is a basic need that is being met here.”

Nicks says some people who are stuck in the waiting room for hours are thrilled to get a chance to tell their stories while others have no interest in talking.

“So many people in the waiting room feel very strongly that their voice doesn’t matter,” Nicks said. “Part of our task is to get past that and not take it personally. The hope is when they see other people’s stories with the story booth, they’ll realize they’re not alone.”

The stories range from tragic to funny and lighthearted, Nicks says, and they go way beyond health issues.

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“One guy was singing on camera,” he said. “It was terrible and off key. He asked my camera operator out on a date and when she told him she was married, he asked if she had a sister.”

Levy and the team working on The Waiting Room will be heading to Sundance in January to be on a panel about the future of storytelling and the web.

“The whole nature of making documentaries is changing,” Levy said. “It used to be that every filmmaker was just working toward the broadcast date. Now it’s not just about reaching out to audiences, but providing a way they can reach in. With the emergence of digital media there are so many opportunities for stories to be used in way that can impact the social movement.”