About Dr Jenkins
Chuka Boris Jenkins, MD, FACOG.
Board-certified in Maternal-Fetal Medicine and Obstetrics & Gynecology.
Twenty-five years of independent hospital-based practice in high-risk obstetrics. Founder of Inheren Medical Strategies (April 2026) and of BRIGHT — Building Resilience, Inspiring Growth, Healing Together — the integrated buprenorphine-based primary care medical home for women with opioid use disorder built at MedStar Harbor Hospital from 2011 to 2026. Dual citizen of the United States and Germany. Native English and German fluency.
Two Tracks, One Thesis
Two lines of work, one underlying thesis. Inheren is one.
The Maternal-Fetal Medicine practice — pregnancy as a window into future women's health. A thesis I first articulated as a Grand Rounds at MedStar Franklin Square in 2014, and called for then: a Maternal Health Clinic, dedicated follow-up infrastructure for women whose pregnancies revealed cardiovascular risk. Twelve years between the proposal and its operational realization. Inheren is that realization.
BRIGHT is the other. A primary-care medical home for women with opioid use disorder, built and run inside MedStar Harbor Hospital from 2011 to 2026. Different patient population, same structural insight: the standard of care names what should happen and the receiving architecture rarely exists. So you build it.
BRIGHT — Building Resilience, Inspiring Growth, Healing Together
From 2011 to 2026, alongside the Maternal-Fetal Medicine practice at MedStar Harbor, I built and ran BRIGHT — an integrated buprenorphine-based opioid use disorder treatment program embedded inside women's primary care.
The standard of care at the time was referral to a center of excellence — Johns Hopkins BayView's Center for Addiction in Pregnancy, where I had collaborated with Drs. Hendrée Jones and Rolley E. Johnson and contributed patients to the PROMISE study, the pilot for what would become the MOTHER study (NEJM 2010 — the landmark trial that established buprenorphine as standard of care alongside methadone in pregnancy).
Referral was supposed to be the answer. In practice it wasn't, for the reasons that always sit on top of these women: transportation, childcare, work, methadone clinics that require daily visits and double as gathering places for the dealers they used to buy from. The barriers to care were the structure of care.
In 2010 I obtained my buprenorphine waiver and stopped referring. BRIGHT was the result. Three active design features: buprenorphine maintenance, a Modified Contingency Management framework, and a deliberate emphasis on therapeutic alliance. Mandatory monthly support group. Accurate drug toxicology used as a portal of truth, not as a discharge trigger. Onsite peer coaching. Approximately two hundred women came through over fourteen years. Operated without external grant funding.
The model is the subject of an implementation brief to Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
EUROPAD 2026 in Bucharest is the next conversation.
Inheren carries this work forward in two forms: as a clinical service — buprenorphine-based addiction telehealth, available to patients in jurisdictions where I am currently licensed — and as a consultative lane covering perinatal SUD program design, expert review, and health policy strategy.
International Deployments
Several short-term acute-phase deployments during the MedStar Harbor years. Not scheduled medical-mission rotations — austere, immediate-aftermath field operations, with continuous coverage of the MFM service.
— Banda Aceh, Indonesia. January 2005. Tsunami response, two to three weeks after the Indian Ocean earthquake, entering by military airlift into a region whose civilian air access had been destroyed. Clinical service in internally-displaced-persons camps.
— Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Late January and early February 2010. Earthquake response, two weeks after the quake. Invited by Aimer Haïti through a Haitian colleague from residency at Catholic Medical Center of Brooklyn and Queens.
— Managua, Nicaragua. April 2011. Clinical service through Orphan Network in La Chureca, the municipal dump that housed roughly a thousand people in extreme poverty.
— Goma, North Kivu Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Early 2020. HEAL Africa — Dr. Jo Lusi's organization. Bedside teaching of fetal heart rate monitoring, labor and delivery service, staff lectures, and introduction of a basic electronic medical record system co-developed earlier. The deployment overlapped the tenth DRC Ebola outbreak.
Where I Practice
Telehealth-only consultative practice. Maryland-licensed (D0047289).
IMLC compact application in process — fee submitted; the practice will expand to compact-eligible states as credentialing completes.
Services include: Maternal-Fetal Medicine consultation; locum tenens MFM coverage; perinatal substance use disorder care (buprenorphine-based addiction telehealth, in jurisdictions where currently licensed); program design and expert review; and health policy strategy.
Self-pay, FSA/HSA eligible. Standard telehealth malpractice.
Inquiries
Press, speaking, KOL/consulting, peer referral, or general professional contact. For appointment booking, please use Schedule a Consultation above.