Cooper Physician Named “Humanitarian of the Year”

Brenner named humanitarian of the year

Dr. Jeffrey Brenner receives Humanitarian of the Year award.

Jeffrey C. Brenner, MD, medical director of the Urban Health Institute at Cooper University Health Care and executive director of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, was honored as Humanitarian of the Year by the Philadelphia Business Journal at its Healthcare Innovators/Doctors of Distinction event on October 20, 2016.

Dr.  Brenner is a family physician that has worked in Camden, NJ, for the past 16 years. His professional career has focused on ensuring that all families who live in urban, underserved communities receive high quality, culturally competent, personalized family health care.

For many years, Dr. Brenner owned and operated a solo-practice. His urban family medicine office provided full-spectrum family health services to a largely Hispanic, Medicaid population. His days were spent delivering babies, caring for children and adults, and doing home visits.

Based on his experiences, he was determined to improve the lives of the sickest residents of Camden – one of America’s poorest cities. Dr. Brenner constructed a searchable database and geographic mapping of discharge data from all patients at Camden’s hospitals. He discovered that 20 percent of patients accounted for 80 percent of health care and social support costs in Camden.

To address this issue, Brenner established the Camden Coalition in 2002 to bring together doctors in community-based private practices, frontline hospital staff, and social workers across the city to participate in a strategy of comprehensive preventive and primary care.

Brenner has demonstrated that using this model of cooperative care – identifying and visiting high-risk patients, earning their trust, offering access to clinical services, preventing medical complications before they occur, addressing social needs before they become medical problems – can reduce repeated emergency room visits and hospitalizations and lower health care costs.

Currently, Dr. Brenner is working with nearly a dozen communities across the country to create accountable care systems based on the Camden model. Brenner’s collaborative approach to health care delivery is an important contribution to the national health care reform effort.

As director of the Institute of Urban Health at Cooper, Dr. Brenner has spearheaded innovative solutions to improving health and reducing costs. Successful initiatives have included establishing group visits for a variety of medical conditions for improved outcomes, providing care management for vulnerable populations following a hospitalization or emergency room visit to help them avoid repeat hospitalizations, and optimizing patient and physician scheduling.

For his work in improving urban health care, in 2013, Brenner was named a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellows program (the so-called “genius grant”) by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for his work to improve urban health care. His work has also been profiled in an article in The New Yorker and in an episode of PBS Frontline.

Media Contact:
Wendy A. Marano
Public Relations Manager
marano-wendy@cooperhealth.edu
856.382.6463

Leave a Reply

DO NOT USE THIS FORM FOR APPOINTMENTS. Using this form will only delay your ability to get an appointment. Please use the contact information in the article or visit appointments.cooperhealth.org.