Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, M.D., is s a pretty smart guy. He earned 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.
Dr. Jeffrey Brenner is also a very caring guy. He’s 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.
But I’m writing about him today because he’s really on to something when it comes to the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) Study.
ChildWise Institute is pretty serious about the ACE Study. We think it quite possibly could be the most important catalyst of positive change for our children and families. One of the walls we’ve run up against, though, is in healthcare… the world of physical health. It seems that physicians are hesitant to embrace the use of the ACE Study in their practices. For good reason… maybe. I think the hesitation is because they don’t want to open up a conversation with their patients if they had been abuse, neglected,or grew up in a household of dysfunction. Touchy stuff, right?
Wrong.
Read Dr. Brenner’s take on this issue. Just click here to see the article.
By the way, Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, M.D. doesn’t just complain about the ACE Study not being used by physicians, he’s got an idea how to make it happen! Read his article here… The answer to incorporating ACE scores into clinical practice
