WASHINGTON, DC –To reduce costs and improve outcomes, identify and engage high-utilizers. That’s one of the messages Jeffrey Brenner, MD, executive director of Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, will deliver in his keynote address at the Primary Care Collaborative’s Stakeholder Conference, April 23-24, 2012 at Washington, DC’s Marriott at Wardman Park.Brenner’s pioneering “hotspotting” work has garnered significant attention and praise; it was featured in Atul Gawande's The New Yorker article “The Hot Spotters” as well as on PBS’ FRONTLINE.

His work began in Camden, N.J. where he determined that the sickest patients were returning repeatedly to the emergency room--at tremendous cost to the health care system. His mapping efforts helped identify frequent emergency room users in an effort to provide them with intensive, personalized community- and patient-centered care management that substantially reduced their rate of hospitalizations. This has both lowered health care costs and provided better care.Brenner is committed to patient-centered care, saying he believes we can reduce medical costs by giving the neediest patients better care.Camden is quickly becoming a model for other cities, and Brenner and his team have begun to map data from other communities that show similar geographic concentrations of high-cost patients.

In his April 23 keynote, he will discuss this research and encourage attendees to apply those ideas in their own communities.American health care doesn't do a good job taking care of sick people, he said in his FRONTLINE interview. “It was really obvious from the data that the most expensive people were getting terrible care. They were getting disorganized, fragmented and uncoordinated care.” What the Camden Coalition has been able to do, through a team approach, is engage these patients, provide personalized, intensive care, and help them navigate the health care system.

“Patient engagement is a centerpiece of the medical home, and Dr. Brenner’s groundbreaking work demonstrates it can make a tremendous difference in costs, quality and outcomes. We are honored to have him address the meeting,” said Marci Nielsen, Ph.D., MPH, PCPCC's CEO. “In the coming year, the PCPCC will renew our focus on the ‘patient-centered’ aspect of the patient-centered medical home. I am confident Dr. Brenner’s keynote address will inspire us to move in that direction.”