Assistant Professor; Core Faculty, UMich Injury Prevention Center
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
I am a member of the Washtenaw Health Initiative – Opioid Project (WHI-OP); a multidisciplinary workgroup using the Project Lazarus model to educate providers and the public regarding the Opioid Epidemic and working to reduce overdose deaths. I act as a liaison between community and health system to improve the care of individuals with SUD. Also, I am part of the ReWrite the Script team at UMich; we focus on effectively helping patients manage pain and reduce harm from opioids. I am on the implementation team for the Addiction Consult Team (ACT) at Michigan Medicine (MM) and wrote our protocol for ED initiated Buprenorphine for Opioid Use Disorder (OUD). I am the UMich physician champion for the Michigan Emergency Department Improvement Collaborative (MEDIC) project to educate opiate overdose patients regarding Naloxone rescue. This team provides a platform for providers across the state to share best practices and lessons learned; it focuses on harm reduction efforts including Take Home Naloxone and waiver training ED physicians to lower the barrier to OUD treatment.
I am Core Faculty in the CDC funded University of Michigan Injury Prevention Center (IPC). I am involved in multiple projects focused on the Opioid Epidemic; I co-led the creation of a web-based toolkit for providers and the public regarding safe prescribing and the care of patients with OUD and I led the creation of a web-based toolkit for post overdose care from the ED. I am also a member of the NIH HEAL Initiative at UMich. This grant funds work to optimize remote health coach-delivered interventions to prevent OUD among adolescents and young adults. We screen patients age 16 – 30 in the Emergency Departments at MM for OUD risk factors and enroll those who are at risk but do not actually have OUD.
I lead the Emergency Medicine Complex Care Management Program (EM-CCMP) in the Office of Population Health at UMich. This team focuses on the most complex, highest consumers of healthcare at MM and works to decrease unnecessary utilization by engaging patients, coordinating with mental health and social service agencies, and facilitating access to outpatient clinical services. I direct the holistic “deep dive” we do to understand utilization by individual patients. Often, we identify patient and system level factors that impact the patient’s decision to utilize the ED and we work to provide the individual alternative options.
I was the Assistant / Associate Program Director for the UMich EM residency program for 11 years. I was given charge of the didactic curriculum and operationalized ideas to make the 4th year of training value-added by creating retreats and skills labs focused on teaching, clinical practice, and operations. I am currently the co-Director of the Diagnostic & Therapeutic Branch at the UMich School of Medicine working with students in the last 18 months of their training. Last year I was the Faculty Supervisor for the creation of a new course, Pandemics & Medicine, to prepare clinical level students for the challenges facing us in Spring 2020.
I do not have any relevant financial / non-financial relationships with any proprietary interests.