Dr. Jennifer Davis is CIHR and MSFHR postdoctoral fellow in the School of Population and Public Health at the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation (C2E2). She is co-supervised by Professor Stirling Bryan and Dr. Teresa Liu-Ambrose. Jennifer’s post-doctoral fellowship (PDF) explores the potential benefit of using patient-centered and outcome-based performance metrics in health care to evaluate performance of actors within the health care system.
Jennifer’s goal is to improve the health of Canadians through outcomes research through the application of novel economic analysis techniques to assess health system performance in chronic and acute conditions. Specifically, her fellowship will explore the benefit of using patient-centered and outcomes-based performance metrics in health care in a variety of clinical settings (i.e., Falls Prevention, Total Knee Arthroplasty and Ophthalmology clinics). In turn, developing novel methods to measure and understand performance variation in our health care system will reveal opportunities to improve the Canadian health care system.
Her PhD work focussed on applied health economic evaluation to the field of falls and fracture prevention in older adults. Jennifer’s doctoral research has contributed to the field of aging in four ways: (1) Her recommendations for reporting economic evaluations for falls prevention strategies that provide the best value for money forms an important contribution at a policy level given resource scarcity (BJSM, 2010). (2) The list of cost items she developed for inclusion in cost of illness (falls) studies (OI, 2010) should improve the quality of future comparative studies and of the cost of illness field more broadly. (3) Importantly, she found that a resistance training program significantly improved health related quality of life compared with control classes (Archives of Internal Medicine, 2010). These results, together with (4) her systematic reviews, demonstrated that economic evaluation and self-perceived assessment of health related quality of life both provide essential, and complementary data for decision makers when allocating scarce health care resources. Jennifer aspires to serve Canadian seniors by applying health services research and knowledge translation at both the community level and with health professionals and policy makers.