Zachary Meisel, MD, MPH

Zachary F. Meisel, MD, MPH is Vice Chair for Faculty Affairs and Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of the Center for Emergency Care Policy and Research at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Meisel’s research interests include pain treatment and opioid prescriptions, narrative communication, guideline adherence, opioid use disorder, patient safety, emergency medical services, and patient centered comparative effectiveness research. He has a specific focus on using and testing persuasive narratives to promote evidence translation to patients, providers and policy makers. Dr. Meisel studies ways to improve the translation of research evidence, particularly around prescription opioids. He is also associate director and outreach lead for the Penn Injury Science Center (PISC), a CDC funded center of excellence. He is the principal investigator of the Life STORRIED study (Life Stories for Opioid Risk Reduction in the Emergency Department) a multiyear, multicenter Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) funded clinical trial focusing on the comparative effectiveness of probabilistic versus patient narrative enhanced risk communication for pain management following emergency care. He is also the multiple PI of a CDC RO1 focused, in partnership with the City of Philadelphia, on evaluation of an overdose ambulance and blight remediation. He also directs the Policy and Dissemination core for the NIH/NIDA-funded Center for Health Economics of Treatment Interventions for Substance Use Disorder, HCV, and HIV (CHERISHresearch.org). He has served as principal investigator or co-PI of major grants from Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the WT Grant Foundation, focused on the translation of evidence to providers and patients. He has received over 8 million dollars in extramural funding as PI or co-PI. He has been continuously funded from the NIH, CDC, AHRQ or PCORI since 2013. Dr. Meisel has been a medical columnist for Slate and Time with expertise in dissemination translation of health services research results for audiences such as patients and policy makers. He is Senior Associate Editor for Health Communication for the journal Academic Emergency Medicine. He has published in medical journals such as JAMA, Health Affairs, Annals of Emergency Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and BMJ. He served on the Philadelphia Mayor’s Task Force to Combat the Opioid Epidemic in 2017.