Jeffrey Brenner ’90 Earns “Genius” Award

Brenner’s collaborative approach to health care delivery has been called “an important contribution to the national conversation on health care reform.”

Primary care physician Jeffrey Brenner ’90 has earned a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the “genius grant,” for his work creating a health care delivery model to meet the medical and social service needs of citizens in the most impoverished communities across the country.

Brenner is one of 24 fellows the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation described as “exceptionally creative individuals with a track record of achievement and the potential for even more significant contributions in the future.” Each will receive a “no-strings attached” grant of $625,000 over five years that will allow them to “exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society.”

Brenner’s efforts already have had a wide impact. After working as a family physician in the underserved neighborhood of Camden, New Jersey, he founded the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, which emphasizes a comprehensive, team approach to preventive and primary care. The Coalition brings together doctors in community-based private practices, frontline hospital staff, and social workers across the city to focus on local “hotpsots,” areas of the city with disproportionate health care needs.

According to the foundation’s announcement: “Brenner has demonstrated that using this model of cooperative care—identifying and visiting high-risk patients, earning their trust, offering access to clinical services, heading off 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.” Brenner has now expanded the model created in Camden to ten cities across the country—including communities in Pennsylvania, Colorado, Missouri, and California.

The Foundation called his collaborative approach to health care delivery “an important contribution to the national conversation on health care reform.”
Brenner earned his medical degree from the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. In addition to serving as the executive director of the Camden Coalition, he is the medical director of the Urban Health Institute at Cooper University Health Care. He teaches at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University.