Zachary F. Meisel, MD MPH MSHP is director of the Center for Emergency Care Policy Research and Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Meisel is associate editor at Academic Emergency Medicine, the official journal for the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine. He serves as the Patient Safety Officer at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, the primary hospital of Penn Medicine. Dr. Meisel’s research interests cover prescription drug overdose, 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.
Dr. Meisel studies ways to improve the translation of research evidence, particularly around prescription opioids. As part of this work, he directs the Policy and Dissemination core (based at LDI) for the NIDA-funded Center for Health Economics of Treatment Interventions for Substance Use Disorder, HCV, and HIV. He is also the principal investigator and co-PI on multiyear grants from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the WT Grant Foundation, focused on the translation of evidence to providers and patients. He is also member of the executive committee for the Penn Injury Science Center (PISC). Dr. Meisel is also a medical journalist with expertise in dissemination translation of health services research results for audiences such as patients and policy makers.
He is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and University of Pennsylvania house officer training program in emergency medicine. He completed additional training in health policy research and health services research as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written for Time.com and Slate. Dr. Meisel served on the Philadelphia Mayor’s Task Force to Combat the Opioid Epidemic in 2017.