By Merin C. MacDonald
In this month’s Chair’s Spotlight, we highlight the work of Elena Byhoff, MD, MSc, an associate professor of medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine with research activities in the Division of Health Systems Science.
Dr. Byhoff is a primary care physician and researcher whose focus is on reducing health disparities and improving health outcomes for her patients through screening for social needs in the clinical setting and establishing partnerships between health care and community organizations. By engaging relevant stakeholders, her goals are to partner with historically marginalized communities to implement evidence-based interventions that may help alleviate negative Health Related Social Needs (HRSN), which can have an impact on an individual’s physical and mental health across the lifespan.
As a fellow at the University of Michigan, Dr. Byhoff explored how disadvantaged social and economic circumstances and unmet needs result in disparities in health outcomes, quality, and costs of care at the end of life. There, she initiated a clinical-community research partnership with the Michigan Primary Care Association, the advocacy organization for Community Health Centers across Michigan, to understand practices and variations in screening for HRSN. From there, she went to Tufts Medical Center where she worked under the mentorship of Dr. Karen Freund, a national leader in health disparities research and community engagement. During that time, she led a study in partnership with the Center for Community Health Education and Research Services in Boston, to look at the uptake and diffusion of pediatric HRSN screening and referral in Boston Community Health Centers. She is currently working with the Greater Lawrence Family Health Center in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to identify community-driven and evidence-based solutions to health disparities in a diverse Caribbean Latinx immigrant community.
Recently, Dr. Byhoff’s work has focused on social determinants of food insecurity and access barriers in low-income and immigrant communities. Her study on the adverse effects of food insecurity on one’s health and how partnerships between health care and community organizations to develop nutrition programs can help mitigate both physical and mental health concerns was published in the February issue of The New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst. In her article titled “A Community Partnership to Reduce Food Insecurity and Improve Patient-Reported Depression,” Dr. Byhoff and her study team describe an intervention in which the Greater Boston Food Bank partnered with community health centers and other community-based locations to implement a mobile market that provides free produce, dairy, and high-protein foods to low-income residents in eastern Massachusetts. The primary goal of this program was to reduce food insecurity, but through data collected from participants, attendance at the market was also associated with improved depression scores. This data suggests that there are benefits to these programs beyond their primary purpose. She is also the principal investigator on a K23 training grant, “Increasing SNAP enrollment in a diverse Latinx community”, from the NIH’s National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities. Here, she aims to develop a SNAP enrollment intervention as a prototype that will advance our understanding of how to identify community-driven strategies for implementing evidence-based social interventions across diverse communities.
Dr. Byhoff joined as faculty and a physician at UMass Chan/UMMH in November 2022. Before she arrived at UMass, she was an attending physician at Tufts Medical Center. Dr. Byhoff earned her medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and completed her Internal Medicine residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She completed her fellowship as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundational Clinical Scholar and she also earned a master of science degree in Health Services Research, both at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Dr. Byhoff’s work will be tremendously beneficial to the Central Massachusetts communities we serve at UMass and we are thrilled that she has joined us in the Department of Medicine.