Reinventing healthcare in one of America's poorest cities

Controlling diabetes and reducing costly hospital stays are two goals of Jeffrey Brenner, the nonprofit Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers' executive director and a physician with Cooper University Hospital. Backed by several large grants, including a recent $2.8 million federal Health Care Innovation Award, Brenner and his team are undertaking one of the nation's most important healthcare experiments. They aim to halt the inexorable rise in health costs in part by caring for patients more effectively in one of the country's poorest cities. Much of their focus is on diabetes. "If you improve the care for diabetics," Brenner said, "you improve the care for lots of complex patients."