Mary-Margaret Chren

Meg Chren is a physician and health services researcher whose work has focused on understanding, measuring, and improving health outcomes of patients with chronic diseases. She has previously developed and validated the Skindex group of skin-related quality-of-life tools, which were developed with strong collaboration with social scientists, and which are widely used as outcomes measures. While at CASBS she will prepare a manuscript about an important but potentially threatened aspect of American healthcare: relatedness in medicine, specifically, the interface among and between physicians and patients, including their relationships and commitment over time. She will explore the role of relatedness in human psychological health and in healthcare, and evidence that relatedness has been eroded or atrophied in American medicine. The goal of the project is to identify strategies to sustain and nurture relatedness in the context of medical encounters.

Chren is professor and chair of the department of dermatology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She has mentored many junior researchers and has authored over 195 peer-reviewed papers. Her work has been funded by grants from the NIH and the Department of Veterans Affairs.