About
Meredith Eicken, MD, MPH is a primary care Internal Medicine and Pediatrics physician with a passion for caring for under-resourced populations. She is graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and did her medical training at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. She completed her Internal Medicine-Pediatrics residency at Harvard Mass General Hospital and served as Med-Peds chief resident her final year. She earned her MPH at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and completed a Kraft Fellowship in Community Health Leadership at Massachusetts General Hospital at Revere HealthCare Center. She has a passion for education, currently precepting residents in the clinic and previously serving as the Associate Program Director for the Prisma Health Med-Peds residency program and the Program Director of the Internal Medicine Residency. Her professional interests include community health, particularly screening and addressing the social determinants of health, for which she has been involved in multiple grants, quality improvement initiatives, and research projects.
How their research is transforming health care
The CDC defines the social determinants of health as “conditions in the places where people live, learn, work, and play [that] affect a wide range of health risks and outcomes.” It is becoming increasingly recognized that health cannot be improved only within the confines of a medical office, but rather that interdisciplinary approaches to improving issues such as food and housing security, education, transportation, and the built environment are essential for improving the overall health of a community. Dr. Eicken’s research and collaborations to date have focused around screening and addressing the social determinants of health, particularly food insecurity, as a way to improve health outcomes for vulnerable pediatric and adult populations. Her interest lies in building clinical-community collaborations as a tool to address these determinants. The unique power in clinical-community partnerships is the ability to leverage the trusted clinical relationship as a point of entry for at-risk patients combined with the need-specific resources and expertise available from community partners. While there is great interest in this concept nationally, there remains a significant gap in our understanding of how and when to best screen patients for the social determinants of health, and what best practices are for intervening when needs are identified.
Health research keywords
Social determinants of health, food insecurity, vulnerable populations, nutrition, resident education
