To kick off the new year, we're revisiting one of our favorite episodes from 2022.

It's about a program designed to help coordinate care for the most complicated patients,

and a study that rigorously tested its efficacy with surprising results.

Before we jump into the episode, I wanted to thank you for spending the last year with me.

I've learned a lot from some really interesting people,

including many of you who've emailed me about the show. I hope you have a wonderful year

connecting with friends and family, and enjoying the things you love. And on that note,

I hope one of the things you'll enjoy is today's episode, which originally came out last summer.

It's called What Can We Do About The Hardest Patients?

As a young family physician, living and working in Camden, New Jersey, in the early 2000s,

Dr. Jeff Brenner started to notice something about his patients.

We were in the most dangerous city in the country, and I had people come into my office,

and I would take staples out, I'd take stitches out, and they had been beaten, they'd been stabbed,

they've been shot, and I'd ask them, this is horrible, did you report your crime to the police?

And they'd sort of laugh at me and say, I'd never call the police here. Honestly, at the time,

I couldn't get my head around that. And I realized, despite the fact that statistically,

we were the most dangerous city in the country, that the true crime rate was probably much, much higher

than we realized. Jeff had an idea. Perhaps emergency room and hospital data could paint a more

accurate picture of crime in Camden, New Jersey. He asked for and received claims data from

local hospitals and health centers. We had no idea what we were doing. We stuck it in

Microsoft Access, we mapped it, graphed it, charted it, and the data was eye popping.

Among other findings, the data suggested that between 2002 and 2007,

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