Jennifer Meddings, MD, MSc, FACP, FAAP

Dr. Meddings is a Professor of Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School, and a Health Services Researcher at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System (VAAAHS). As a board-certified and practicing physician in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, she cares for patients as a University of Michigan primary care physician for complex patients. Her research career, with over 98 peer-reviewed articles, has focused on the development, implementation, and evaluation of evidence-based interventions to care of patients with complex conditions, including prevention of healthcare-associated conditions, including publications in Annals of Internal Medicine, BMJ Quality and Safety, and the Journal of Hospital Medicine. A significant proportion of her earlier research focused on assessing the implementation of value-based purchasing programs that use combinations of payment removal, public reporting, and hospital financial penalty for hospital-acquired complications such as catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI), pressure ulcers (now known as pressure injuries), and readmissions. More recently, her research applied the RAND/UCLA Appropriateness Method to formally rate the appropriateness of 3 types of urinary catheters (indwelling urinary catheters, intermittent straight catheter, and external catheters) for hundreds of clinical scenarios commonly encountered in hospitalized adults on medical services. She extended this work to common general and orthopedic surgical procedures and surgery for benign prostatic hypertrophy. These appropriateness criteria were developed into a free educational application called BladderSafe (https://www.bladdersafe.org/bladdersafe-app.html) for use by nurses, physicians, infection preventionists, and trainees. Her work has also focused on applying these appropriateness criteria to identify opportunities for improvement in large surgical collaboratives, including the Michigan Surgical Quality Collaborative (https://msqc.org/success/). In this project, her team developed new measures and tools 1) to identify opportunities to improve perioperative catheter use, 2) to recognize and manage post-operative urinary retention, and 3) to recognize risk and prevent trauma from urinary catheter placement.