Mary Catherine Beach

About

Mary Catherine Beach, MD, MPH, is a professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Health, Behavior & Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her scholarship focuses on respect and relationships in healthcare, encompassing both empirical and conceptual dimensions. Her empirical work has primarily centered on respect and communication between patients and clinicians, with recent research concentrating on people living with HIV/AIDS and sickle cell disease. Dr. Beach's research has been funded by prominent institutions including the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Greenwall Foundation. She serves on the editorial board for Patient Education and Counseling and on the Advisory Board for Communication in Medicine. At Johns Hopkins, she is co-chair of an Institutional Review Board (IRB), Course Director of the Scholarly Concentrations Program in the School of Medicine, and Director of the TL1 Predoctoral Clinical Research training program, contributing significantly to education and research in healthcare communication, respect, and patient-centered care.

Research topics

• Linguistics
• Family medicine
• Psychology
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Physician Use of Stigmatizing Language in Patient Medical Records

  JAMA Network Open · 2021 · 211 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Importance: Negative attitudes toward patients can adversely impact health care quality and contribute to health disparities. Stigmatizing language written in a patient's medical record can perpetuate negative attitudes and influence decision-making of clinicians subsequently caring for that patient. Objective: To identify and describe physician language in patient health records that may reflect, or engender in others, negative and positive attitudes toward the patient. Design, Setting, and Par…

  DOI

• Stigmatizing Mothers: Qualitative Analysis of Languagein Prenatal Records

  Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics · 2025-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  Pregnant people experience moral judgment in healthcare settings that may be coded into clinical documentation. Stigmatizing language in medical records transmits bias between clinicians, potentially exacerbating disparities in maternal morbidity and mortality. We examined obstetrical records from 100 randomly selected patients who received prenatal and delivery care in an academic hospital system. Qualitative analysis sought to identify linguistic features conveying negative attitudes or moral…

  PublisherDOI

• “He said he could take his own advice”: Stigmatizing language in notes documenting discharges against medical advice

  Journal of Hospital Medicine · 2025-09-03 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  BACKGROUND: Against medical advice (AMA) discharges are associated with adverse clinical outcomes and can be stigmatizing to patients. Most prior work has described patient characteristics associated with AMA discharges, with little attention to interpersonal clinician-patient dynamics that culminate in a discharge being designated AMA. OBJECTIVE: To describe clinical documentation about patients whose hospitalizations ended in an AMA discharge, attending to both what was written and how it was…

  PublisherDOI

• The Credibility Deficit Experienced by Black Patients

  JAMA Network Open · 2024-10-14 · 3 citations

  letterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Communication With Families of Children With Overweight Status or Obesity During Consultation for Tonsillectomy

  JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery · 2025-06-18 · 2 citations

  article

  Importance: Children with overweight or obesity experience greater prevalence, severity, and perioperative risk of obstructive sleep-disordered breathing and persistent sleep apnea after tonsillectomy. Yet, little is known about how weight status influences communication between surgeons and families in presurgical consultations. Objectives: To evaluate the association between patient weight status with (1) clinician-parent communication and (2) parent ratings of care experience during tonsillec…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Communication Quality and Patient Outcomes in HIV/AIDS and Substance Abuse

  NIH · $923k · 2015–2022

• Maximizing respect and improving outcomes in HIV and substance abuse (MaRIPOHSA)

  NIH · $3.1M · 2014–2022

• NIH Grant K08HS013903

  NIH · $606k · 2008

Frequent coauthors

• Somnath Saha

  204 shared

• Sophie Lanzkron

  Johns Hopkins Hospital

  157 shared

• Carlton Haywood

  Johns Hopkins Medicine

  153 shared

• Richard D. Moore

  Johns Hopkins University

  146 shared

• Lisa A. Cooper

  Johns Hopkins University

  111 shared

• Eric B Bass

  Johns Hopkins University

  86 shared

• P. Todd Korthuis

  Oregon Health & Science University

  80 shared

• John J. Strouse

  Duke University

  78 shared

Education

• MD

  Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Awards & honors

• Greenwall fellow (Bioethics and Health Policy)
• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Generalist Physician Facult…

Similar researchers at Johns Hopkins University

• Jeremy Sugarmanh-83
• Ruth R. Fadenh-71
• Thomas H. Gallagherh-57