Primary Care Population Medicine

Master’s thesis: “Identifying Barriers to Care in the Hepatitis C Cascade of Care at a Rhode Island Infectious Disease Clinic, 2014-2019: A Retrospective Chart Review”

Residency: UC San Diego School of Medicine, Family Medicine

Jenny Thai never imagined she’d become a doctor. After graduating from college, she wanted to use her writing skills to support nonprofits and took a job at a federally qualified health center. As she saw firsthand the importance of primary care and the problems of healthcare access that many people face, she began to consider a career change.

“I worked for five years prior to medical school. Part of that was due to me wanting to make sure: is medicine really for me?” Jenny says. She worked full-time while taking night classes and then applying to medical school.

“I already had a pretty good vision that I wanted to go into primary care,” she says. “The main reason why I was interested in Brown was specifically the PC-PM Program. I wanted to be able to approach medicine from a problem-solving perspective, to learn to think globally to try to solve these systemic problems.”

The LIC offered Jenny an opportunity to look at the bigger picture: she learned multiple specialties simultaneously while building long-term relationships. “It was very rewarding to be able to follow my patients over the course of the year. That’s something you don’t really get with a traditional block curriculum,” she says. She also got to know her preceptors well, and their individual approaches to doctoring. “There’s more than one way to practice medicine,” Jenny notes.

The former English major particularly appreciated one physician’s approach. “One of my preceptors likes opening their patient encounter with, ‘Tell me your story,’ and I think that’s such a wonderful way to open patient visits,” Jenny says. “It’s also a reminder that every patient is more than just their problem list: hearing about their worries and fears, whether or not they’re facing housing insecurity or food insecurity, looking at the places that they work and live in.”

Outside of school, Jenny builds and strengthens relationships through cooking. “I love feeding people,” she says. From batches of baked goods to “elaborate, multi-course meals, I fed my doctoring group as often as I could.”

Jenny took up baking during the COVID quarantine, to relieve stress—and found parallels to her work. “Bread is unpredictable. Even if you follow the exact same process, you still can end up with two loaves of bread that are very different from each other,” she says. “It’s a little bit like medicine. You can be completely floored by how differently the same disease can manifest in two different patients, and those differences can be influenced by how different their lives are.”