October 20th - Breakout Workshop: Optimizing Medication Information

Annlouise Assaf, Ph.D. is a pharmacoepidemiologist who is a Senior Director, Patient Health Activation Expert with the Global Medical Impact Assessment (GMIA) team within Worldwide Medical and Safety at Pfizer. In Dr. Assaf's role in the Chief Medical Office, she focuses on quality benefit-risk communication, improving patient health activation and equity, and optimizing patient-facing health content so that patients can make informed shared decisions about their treatment with their healthcare providers, use their medications safely and appropriately, and improve value outcomes. Prior to joining Pfizer, she spent many years in academic medicine and clinical research.  She received her doctorate from Roswell Park Cancer Institute at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is currently a Professor (Adjunct) at Brown University School of Public Health and the preceptor for the Pfizer-Brown University Pre-doctoral Fellowship.

Candida is a healthcare communications specialist and visiting lecturer / researcher in health psychology at University of Westminster, London, UK. She is the founder of Studio Health, a London-based practice that works with clients to optimize patient-HCP communications. Candida and her team work with health professional groups, the pharmaceutical industry and communications consultancies.

Asia (Joanna) Lem, MPH is a Director, Safety Surveillance Research Strategic Implementation Lead at Pfizer, Inc.. She has been with Pfizer’s Safety Surveillance Research Group (formerly known as Safety Epidemiology group) since 2007.  Asia has a Master in Public Health (MPH) degree from the Yale School of Public Health. In the past few years, her work experience and focus had been in the area of design and implementation of evaluations of risk minimization programs; she is also interested how health communication and health literacy best practices relate to the program effectiveness.

Dr. Michael Wolf is the James R. Webster Jr. Professor of Medicine within the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. In addition, Dr. Wolf serves as Director for the Center for Applied Health Research on Aging (CAHRA) and leads Northwestern’s Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center – a member of the National Institute on Aging’s Pepper Center Network. He is health services researcher and cognitive-behavioral scientist with expertise in health literacy, aging, chronic disease self-management, and the design of health system interventions to promote health, particularly among more medically complex, older adults living with multiple chronic conditions (MCC). For the past two decades, Dr. Wolf has led studies investigating: 1) individual and health system determinants of health services use and outcomes, and 2) the effectiveness and fidelity of interventions aimed at helping patients better engage in healthcare and self-manage chronic conditions. In 2004, Dr. Wolf founded the Health Literacy & Learning Program (HeLP) at Northwestern to create a network of multidisciplinary faculty that could partner together to generate applied, innovative research that would help transform the delivery of healthcare for vulnerable patients (older adults a specific target). He also serves as Associate Division Chief for General Internal Medicine & Geriatrics, and Associate Vice Chair for the Department of Medicine