Family Medicine

Family Medicine Residency: Brown Family Medicine Residency/Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island
MSc, Boston University School of Public Health; MD, Alpert Medical School of Brown University; BA, Brown University

Dr. Wilkinson is a RI native and a graduate of Brown University (AB, MD), the Brown Family Medicine Residency, and the Boston University School of Public Health (MSc). She has extensive teaching and leadership experience, as course director of a required medical student course on public health, fellowship director in the Department of Family Medicine at Boston University, medical director of the Physician Assistant Education Program at BU, and has served as a clinical leader and teacher in a variety of inpatient and outpatient settings. At Brown, her teaching has focused on efficiency, productivity, quality and safety in outpatient settings, as well as improving access to care for geriatric patients and people with disabilities.

Dr. Wilkinson is a health disparities researcher with expertise in mixed methods research and populations marginalized due to low health literacy. She received a career development award from NCI to study factors affecting mammography adherence in women with intellectual disabilities, and published several manuscripts related to the work that her team did. The team's findings, that women with low health literacy seem to learn more from video-based health education, helped inform the development of a pilot intervention to disseminate information about breast cancer screening to women with intellectual disabilities. This research also informed other projects she pursued in quality of life for patients with aphasia and low-literacy health interventions for patients without intellectual disabilities.

After seven years serving as the medical director of the Family Care Center, Dr. Wilkinson returned to a research career at Brown studying the impact of trauma and PTSD on health behaviors, and the uptake of newer diabetes therapies in urban Latinx patients. These project areas are linked by the use of mixed-methods research culminating in digital/video based health interventions, and attention to populations which might have less trust in the health care system.