Detailed Biographical Information for Jennifer Christian MD MPH FACOEM
Jennifer Christian, MD, MPH is an internationally-known thought leader and advocate for improving health and functional outcomes and for preventing needless work disability in healthcare, workers’ compensation, and disability benefits systems. Dr. Christian is President of Webility Corporation. Webility has conducted management consulting and training projects with clients in several sectors: healthcare delivery organizations, managed care companies, large and small employers, workers’ compensation insurers, disability insurers, state funds and other governmental agencies, including the US Social Security Administration.
Dr. Christian is board-certified in occupational medicine with medical and public health degrees from the University of Washington in Seattle. She is a Fellow of the American College of Occupational & Environmental Medicine (FACOEM) and chairs its Work Fitness & Disability Section.
Dr. Christian is well known nationally and internationally as a presenter and educator. In live sessions, she has taught thousands of physicians and other professionals the basic principles of work disability prevention and how to play their role in the stay-at-work and return-to-work process. In addition, several thousand claims and case managers — and more than 1500 doctors — have completed one of Webility’s intensive on-line educational modules on these topics.
She is also an innovator. In 2001, she founded and still runs the multi-disciplinary Work Fitness & Disability Roundtable, now with over 1,300 members. In 2008, she won four awards for her efforts to propagate the work disability prevention model via The 60 Summits Project. This non-profit initiative produced 20 multi-stakeholder summit-type workshops in 14 jurisdictions across North America. Continuing progress towards positive change is on-going in many of those locations.
In the last two years, Webility has pioneered a multi-dimensional approach to working age individuals who became injured or ill and then got "stuck in the system" — people who continue to suffer and are unable to work despite traditional medical care, managed care, and claim management processes. Webility’s Maze-Masters program takes a non-medical, structured, guided, multi-dimensional approach that emphasizes self-development. Maze-Masters Guides serve as personal tutors and coaches. The program helps these individuals identify their life goals and resolve issues in a variety of domains of life that have been hindering functional recovery. The program educates them on key topics in order to enlarge and shift perspective and teaches self-care, self-soothing, coping skills and life skills. The overall purpose is to strengthen these individuals’ determination, ability, and confidence that they can find a way to move forward, get everyday life back to normal, and return to full participation in life despite what has happened to them. Early results are promising, with several lives already transformed.
Most recently, Dr. Christian founded the Praxis Partners Consortium. This organization gives professionals with similar values and commitments a platform from which to promote the biopsychosocial model of illness and disability as well as a multi-dimensional approach to evidence-based care. Membership in the Consortium will make it easy for purchasers and suppliers with a shared philosophy to find one another and do business together. They will prosper by delivering better overall outcomes than traditional methods and systems do. Consortium members can also collaborate to develop and refine clinical, communications, data collection, marketing and financial methods, tools and techniques. They can conduct practical research on how to translate evidence into successful practice under real world conditions. Interest in this new organization has been active and lively, and seems to hold much promise for making a significant difference.