Family physician, Jeffrey Brenner, has been named a 2013 MacArthur Fellow for his revolutionary, community-based approach to healthcare. As a primary care doctor in Camden, NJ – one of the poorest cities in America – Brenner saw how the healthcare system was failing impoverished patients each and every day.

“We’re taking really vulnerable sick people, and not taking good care of them. And we’re spending a lot of money in the process. We can do better,” Brenner says in a video we produced, explaining his innovative health care delivery model. He saw the damage being done to patients first-hand, and was determined to improve the lives and health of his community.

According to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the sickest five percent of the American population account for over sixty percent of healthcare costs. So Brenner founded the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers (CCHP) in 2003, which has since then dramatically altered healthcare in his community by lowering costs and providing better care. Brenner explains, “I felt like if I reached up out of my office and grabbed a hold of a big data set, then I could begin to prove what I was seeing in my office.” So he used billing data to map “hot spots,” where health care spending was highest. By first identifying these most costly patients, or health care “high-utilizers,” the CCHP could then aim resources and brainpower directly at those who needed it most.

Since implementation, Brenner and the CCHP have reduced E.R. visits by forty percent and hospital charges by fifty-six percent in Camden. With such promising results, Brenner is resolute: “We need to figure this out, because if you can fix healthcare for a high-utilizer, you really can fix it for everyone. . . . Right now we have a passive medical system that waits for you to come to it. And what we need to do is create a medical system that actively seeks out sick people and takes much better care of them.”

Watch the film to learn more about Jeffrey Brenner’s mission and how hot-spotting is transforming healthcare. Brenner is also the medical director of the Urban Health Institute at the Cooper University Health Care and on the faculty of the Cooper Medical School at Rowan University.