Lise M. Bjerre

Dr. Lise M. Bjerre is an epidemiologist and a family physician. She is the inaugural University of Ottawa and Institut du Savoir Montfort Chair in Family Medicine, (a position she has held since January 1st, 2021), a researcher with the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Ottawa and a practicing family physician working at the Active Care Medical Clinic in Kanata. Her research focuses on access to primary health care (particularly for vulnerable and underserved populations, including Francophones minorities and rural populations medication in primary care), and on the appropriate use of medications at the population level. She also conducts evidence-based knowledge syntheses to improve clinical practice and to foster patient involvement in managing their own health. In addition, she uses artificial intelligence (AI) in combination with population databases as a means to make better use of existing data resource.

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).