Jennifer L. Ridgeway, Ph.D.

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SUMMARY

Jennifer L. Ridgeway, Ph.D., M.P.P., is a health services researcher and implementation scientist with expertise in qualitative and mixed-methods research. Dr. Ridgeway is interested in methodological approaches that appreciate the complexity in healthcare and engage patients and care teams to improve care delivery. Dr. Ridgeway's research focuses on using networks, technology and collaboration to increase access to patient-centered, compassionate and evidence-based care close to home, especially for people with cancer and chronic conditions.

Focus areas

• Patient-centered care that meets the needs of each person. Dr. Ridgeway studies the patient experience of health and healthcare, patient-clinician communication, and shared decision-making. She uses mixed methods to design and evaluate models of care that respond to the unique needs of people with multiple chronic conditions or with barriers to care. Dr. Ridgeway's work also includes developing measures to assess outcomes that matter to patients, including treatment burden.
• Multidisciplinary teamwork and networks. Dr. Ridgeway is interested in multidisciplinary teamwork and networks that connect people to make high-quality, evidence-based care available close to home. She studies care models that link members of care teams across disciplines and settings. This includes connections between clinicians in community settings and specialists in academic medical centers. She has studied the ability of networks to support coordinated care and provide opportunities to share information and expertise, including primary care-oncology collaboration for survivors of cancer.
• Community-based, remote and technology-enabled interventions. Dr. Ridgeway studies community-based, remote and technology-enabled interventions to support patient-centered compassionate and accessible care. Dr. Ridgeway evaluates interventions that make care more accessible while maintaining relationships in care. These interventions include using patient portals to support cancer symptom monitoring between clinical visits. They also include remote technologies to deliver rehabilitation programs for people with chronic conditions and community paramedicine programs to deliver preventive and acute care in home and community settings.
• Practice-embedded research designs and implementation. Dr. Ridgeway studies practice-embedded research designs and their implementation to speed practice change and meet the needs of care teams. Dr. Ridgeway has expertise in practice-embedded pragmatic trial and rapid evaluation approaches that leverage routinely collected data and reduce research burden on patients and care teams. She has extensive experience designing and evaluating implementation strategies to improve adoption and routine use of evidence-based practices in busy clinical settings. She also has expertise in process evaluation methods to understand whether interventions are implemented as intended.
• Research to address health disparities. Through collaboration, Dr. Ridgeway supports research aimed at fostering equitable healthcare access, especially in the areas of primary preventive care, early cancer detection and cancer survivorship. She is interested in community-engaged and participatory approaches to research, including methods to involve community members in research and to evaluate whether interventions are implemented equitably.

Significance to patient care

Dr. Ridgeway works with patients, community members and care teams to make care more patient-centered, collaborative and equitable. Her research helps clinicians understand and assess outcomes that matter to patients. She also studies ways that clinicians collaborate across specialties and settings so that patients get best-evidence care close to home.