Christine Arenson, MD
Co-Director
Professor, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health
National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education, University of Minnesota

Christine A. Arenson, MD was named co-director of the National Center for Interprofessional Practice in July 2020, working in leadership Nexus with Barbara Brandt, the National Center’s founding director. Dr. Arenson brings a wealth of experience in practice transformation and strengthens the National Center’s commitment to collaborative practice and interprofessional clinical learning during a pivotal time. Dr. Arenson will lead the future strategic direction of the center. 

Prior to joining the National Center, Dr. Arenson served as Alumni Professor and Chair of the Department of Family and Community Medicine, Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Dr. Arenson graduated from the University of Delaware in 1986 and Jefferson Medical College in 1990. She completed family medicine residency training at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, followed by a fellowship in geriatric medicine. She was the founding Director of the Jefferson Division of Geriatric Medicine and Palliative Care and has focused on patient-centered care and team education for health professionals as strategies to improve the health of older adults. She was the founding Co-Director of the Jefferson Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education, serving in that role from 2007-2016. Most recently, she has been actively engaged in primary care transformation to meet the Quadruple Aim: Improve the Experience of Care, Improve Health Outcomes, Reduce Costs and Restore Joy in Practice.  She serves on the board of Jeff Care Alliance, Jefferson’s clinically integrated network, and the Executive Steering Committee for Jefferson Health population health and primary care service lines, implementing a new Advanced Primary Care Model across the Jefferson primary care network, now including over 100 practices. From 2013 – 2019 she was a member of the board of the Delaware Valley ACO. She also works to educate healthcare teams to improve healthcare outcomes. She is a past chair of the American Interprofessional Health Collaborative. She has served as a member of the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education Knowledge Generation Advisory Committee since 2014.

Presenting at the Nexus Summit:

The principles of interprofessional practice and education, with a focus on teams and patient-centered care, have become a mainstay of many funding opportunities that focus on practice transformation, new models of care and preparing the future work health workforce.  Yet, many programs do not have practical experience designing interprofessional learning experiences around these principles nor an informatics infrastructure to assess its outcomes. Organizations seeking to implement interprofessional practice and education transformation to achieve outcomes that matter most to people…
An overarching goal of social science is to make the familiar strange – to expose what we often take for granted.  Utilizing established theories, concepts, and constructs as maps, and particular quantitative and qualitative methodologies as a compass, social scientists (sociologists, psychologists, educators, economists, anthropologists) shed valuable light on not only the if and the what, but more importantly the why and the how of the social world around us. This seminar will explore the significance of the social sciences within IPE, using a case study of a clinician and social scientist…
An increasing number of national and international imperatives1 2 identify interprofessional collaborative practice and education transformation as a primary strategy to improve healthcare outcomes, especially among those who experience inequities in their ability to achieve their full health potential. These imperatives often don’t address the practical barriers healthcare teams face in collecting the data needed to understand the complex interactions between individuals, health teams, technology and workflows to inform decisions about strategies to design and implement new care models and…