Advanced Practice Providers

Lauren Boyd Blanchard, FNP

I joined the gastroenterology field in October 2020, specializing from an 18-year career in family practice. Did I start as a clinician with the Peace Corps, doing health education in a West African village? No I think it actually started in grade school, discovering that in case of a skinned knee, I could turn my younger brother’s frown upside down by asking in a goofy voice if he’d broken his epidermis. Big words + blood = humor, who knew?!

My primary care career spanned a community health center in rural New Mexico, an ER and a family practice in Albuquerque, and finally a Stanford primary care clinic in Oakland. In my last year at Stanford, I represented all the Stanford APPs in the Northeast Bay Area to the board of our section of Stanford Medicine. I was also featured in a 2016 video about Stanford clinicians. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCw2f8OONKQ&authuser=0

I am proud of APPs and excited about the opportunities we create and enjoy at this moment. However, I also feel there are many ways in which the system we serve is broken, and know we can shape its fate going forward. For one thing, our country must reign in the costs of healthcare, and we APPs are well positioned to meet that need.

My superpower is combining clinical knowledge with cultural skills to put patients at ease and help them manifest their own agency. In GI, it seems that there are numerous ways to specialize but so far, I am finding fecal microbiotic transplantation, IBD, and anal cancer screening to be intriguing possibilities for professional growth. (Again: early practice with poo jokes: prescient?) I am also interested in potentially getting into the scoping suite as I grow up in this field. I look forward to learning what you are up to, my colleagues. Thanks for the work you’ve been doing, and let’s see where we can take this field together!