Maren Vanderlyn, MD

Maren Vanderlyn was the second of the founding clinicians and is the practice's medical director. She trained in family medicine at the Mount Sinai Beth Israel Urban Family Medicine residency, which is the residency that broke her of the habit of using marketing language for clinical services. The residency required interns to write a one-paragraph clinical-justification letter for every prior authorization they signed; she wrote 412 of them in three years.

Before opening Pharos in October 2019 she practiced for five years at a federally qualified health center in Newburgh, where she did her first 80 IUC placements, her first 40 buprenorphine inductions, and her first 30 gender-affirming hormone therapy initiations. The Newburgh practice taught her two things that the formulary inherits directly: the value of writing the contraindication down, and the discipline of refusing to expand scope without expanding staff.

Today she carries an adult panel of 320 (closed at this size since 2023), the practice's gender-affirming hormone therapy panel of 64 active patients, and the medical-director responsibilities for hiring, formulary version control, and quarterly internal audit. She is the named co-author of CCH-001 and the named co-owner of CCH-004 and CCH-006.

Her practice clinical interests are: gender-affirming hormone therapy on the UCSF Transgender Care informed-consent model; adult chronic disease management with an emphasis on deprescribing; and the operational design of small primary-care practices. She has spoken at the AAFP Family Medicine Experience (FMX) twice, on direct primary care economics and on the formulary-style documentation method this practice uses.

She is the named author or co-author of three of the six monographs and is responsible for the quarterly review of references for currency.

Credentials

• Doctor of Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine (2011) — einsteinmed.edu
• Family medicine residency, Mount Sinai Beth Israel Residency in Urban Family Medicine (2014) — mountsinai.org
• Board-certified, American Board of Family Medicine — theabfm.org
• NPI 1234567890 (lookup: CMS NPI Registry)
• NY medical license #267984 (lookup: NY Office of Professional Medical Conduct)
• NY medical license #267984 (lookup: NYSED Office of the Professions)
• WPATH-aligned GAHT training — wpath.org

Authoring responsibilities

Maren Vanderlyn, MD is named in the Authors field of the following monographs and is responsible for keeping them current.

• CCH-001 Adult primary care — co-author
• CCH-004 Reproductive & gender — co-owner (menopause & GAHT)
• CCH-006 Acute & after-hours — co-owner

Outside the room

Reads on the porch of the Lighthouse Park overlook. Volunteers as a board member at the Kingston Library. Has not yet learned to sail despite living three blocks from a working harbor.