Jeffrey Brenner is a primary care physician in Camden, New Jersey who founded the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers to address the high healthcare costs of a small number of vulnerable patients. The Coalition brings together doctors, hospital staff, and social workers to provide coordinated care through teams that identify at-risk patients, address their medical and social needs, and help reduce emergency room visits and hospitalizations. Brenner has expanded this model to ten other communities across the U.S. and his collaborative approach is an important contribution to national healthcare reform discussions.

1. Jeffrey Brenner
Primary Care Physician
Founder and Executive Director
Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers
Camden, NJ
Age: 44
Published September 25, 2013
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Jeffrey Brenner is a primary care physician creating a health care delivery model to meet the
medical and social service needs of the most vulnerable citizens in impoverished communities.
Determined to improve the lives of the sickest residents of Camden, New Jersey—one of America’s
poorest cities—Brenner constructed a searchable database and geographic mapping of discharge
data from all patients at Camden’s hospitals and discovered that a very small number of patients
consumed a large share of the overall costs of health care and social supports.
To address this issue, Brenner established the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, bringing
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. He
designed a system that delivers daily information about hospitalizations to the Coalition and
members of Care Management Teams. Each team is made up of a registered nurse, one or two
licensed practical nurses, a health coach, and a social worker to support and help coordinate care
for patients with complex medical, and often social, issues.
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.
Currently working with ten communities across the country, including Allentown, Pennsylvania;
Aurora, Colorado; Kansas City, Missouri; and San Diego, California, on developing sustainable and
accountable care systems based on the Camden model, Brenner’s collaborative approach to health
care delivery is an important contribution to the national conversation on health care reform.
Jeffrey Brenner received a B.S. (1990) from Vassar College and an M.D. (1995) from Robert Wood
Johnson Medical School at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and he
completed his residency in family medicine at the Swedish Health Center in Seattle, Washington
(1995–1998). In addition to serving as executive director of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare
Providers since its founding in 2003, Brenner is the medical director of the Urban Health Institute at
the Cooper University Healthcare and on the faculty of the Cooper Medical School at Rowan
University.