Elizabeth Toll, MD is Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine, Clinician Educator at Brown. Starting in 1997, she helped to build Brown’s combined Medicine-Pediatrics (“Med-Peds”) residency program, particularly the outpatient residency clinic where she practiced and taught multigenerational primary care and served at various times as Medical Director, Director of Refugee Health, and Lead for the Integration of Behavioral Health initiative as part of the Care Transformation Collaborative. She was an instructor in the first -year Doctoring course at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University for ten years. Since 2016, she has helped to spearhead a multidisciplinary group of patients, physicians, nurses, mental health professionals, engineers, informaticists, institutional leaders, and government officials from the United States and around the world who are exploring how to prioritize human relationships as digital technology is increasingly integrated into health care. She has served as Planning Chair for three international conferences on this subject, most recently The Patient and the Practitioner in the Age of Technology: Promoting Healing Relationships in Providence in October 2022. She stepped back from patient care in 2021 and since has been working with physicians at all stages of career as a physician coach. Since 2018 she has served on the Advisory Board of the Gold Humanism and Honor Society at the Arnold P. Gold Foundation.
She completed her MD and residency in combined internal medicine-pediatrics at the University of Rochester and a fellowship in psychotherapy at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. Her professional interests, research, and writing include the integration of mental health and primary care, refugee health, at-risk urban youth, medical humanities (particularly reflective writing), the interface of medicine and creativity, and the impact of the electronic health record on the relationship between patients and clinicians. As the wife of an academic physician and the mother of three grown children she has a professional and personal interest in the challenges of maintaining work-life balance at all stages of career.
