Vanessa Maier, MD, MPH is a family physician, Medical Director of the MetroHealth School Health Program, and Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. She is interested in exploring innovative models of care, focused on reducing disparities and optimizing the health of urban youth, and in teaching population health through coaching and experiential learning.

In her role as Medical Director of the MetroHealth School Health Program, she has worked collaboratively with a diverse team of medical and educational administrators, physicians, teachers, nurses, nurse practitioners, psychologists, social workers, community health workers, clinical informatics specialists and a broad range of students and community members to dramatically expand the capacity of the program. By focusing on population health initiatives, the MetroHealth School Health program has tripled enrollment, doubled visit volumes, increased completion of preventive health services, decreased emergency service utilization and improved school attendance. https://growingwell.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/MetroHealth-School-Health-Program-CMSD-Evaluation-Report.pdf Along with partners at Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital and local Federally Qualified Health Centers including Care Alliance and Neighborhood Family Practice, she is founder of the North-East Ohio Collaborative of School Based Health Providers. Prior to joining MetroHealth, she was the director of the Centering Parenting Program at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center. This innovative program, providing group well child care visits for women and children in low income communities while training future clinicians in group care, documented near 100% immunization and preventive visit completion as well as breast feeding rates close to 80% at 6 months of age.

As a medical educator, she has been involved in residency training since the completion of her academic fellowship, initially in the Residency Program in the Department of Family Medicine at University Hospitals through a HRSA supported Primary Care Training Grant focused on training in the care of medically vulnerable adolescents. She currently teaches population health to Family Medicine residents at MetroHealth and has developed a longitudinal rotation in a School Based Health Center. This innovative curriculum teaches leadership, advocacy, community partnership and clinical informatics while supporting a resident-driven, social determinant informed, population health management initiative utilizing a clinical registry and care coordination framework.

As core block lead faculty, she oversees the implementation of a social medicine curriculum during the first year of the CWRU SOM core curriculum, one of the first programs to integrate specific training on implicit bias and structural racism in undergraduate medical education. Through Team Based Learning, Case Inquiry small groups, panel discussions, table top exercises and field experiences at over 40 community organizations, students are introduced to fundamental concepts in epidemiology, biostatistics, evidence-based medicine, bioethics, health systems science, data science, quality improvement, preventive medicine, environmental health, occupational health, population heath, public health, and social determinants. In response to demand from her students who wanted to continue to the discussion ‘from structural violence to systemic change’ she collaborates with local, regional, national and international advocacy champions (her students!) Together they are developing advocacy curriculum for the next generation of physicians eager to move from understanding to action.