Lise M. Bjerre

Dr. Lise M. Bjerre is an epidemiologist and a family physician. She is a researcher with the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Ottawa and a practicing family physician working as a staff physician at the Civic Family Health Team of the Ottawa Hospital. Her research focuses on medication in primary care, and her interests include drug safety and effectiveness, using aspects of prescribing as markers of quality of care, and methodological issues in large health databases.

Since joining the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Ottawa in June 2010, she has been successful in obtaining funding as principal investigator (PI) from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) for two projects that use Ontario’s large health administrative databases (ICES data). These include her study on the effect of Post-discharge Outpatient Care on unplanned readmissions (the EPOC-readmission study), and her newest CIHR grant that focuses on assessing Potentially Inappropriate prescribing (PIP) in Ontario’s elderly population (the PIP-STOPP study). She is also the principal investigator on a grant funded by the Ontario Ministry of Health through the Bruyere Centre for Learning and Research in Long-Term Care (CLRI) whose aim is to validate tools to identify PIP using health administrative data, by comparing their performance when applied to clinical data, which is considered the gold standard.

She is also co-investigator on a large CIHR-funded Drug Safety and Effectiveness Network (DSEN) initiative, the NETMAN collaborating center, using network meta-analyses and related methods to answer questions about drug safety and effectiveness (co-PIs: David Moher and Edward Mills). She has also joined a large team that focus on the development of deprescribing guidelines for the elderly (PI: Barbra Farrell), also funded by the Ontario Ministry of Health as part of the Ontario Pharmacy Research Network (OPEN).