Jennifer Christian, MD, MPH, FACOEM is a thought leader and advocate for improving medical outcomes and preventing needless work disability in workers’ compensation and disability benefits systems. Dr. Christian serves as an emissary of occupational medicine to the world of industry, government, and disability management. She has a flair for interpreting the physician’s worldview to other stakeholder groups and vice-versa. She has long been a frequent speaker at conferences, moderates two different list-servs for professionals, and most recently has become a blogger. She is also an innovator, having started new organizations and developed and launched new products, programs, and services designed to improve outcomes several times during her career.
She is board-certified in occupational medicine and earned both her medical and public health degrees from the University of Washington in Seattle. She is a Fellow of the American College of Occupational & Environmental Medicine and chairs its Work Fitness & Disability Section. Her career in occupational medicine has been spent in multiple settings — in private practice, in heavy industry, in public health, in managed care, in workers’ compensation insurance, and in consulting
–and in a variety of states, most notably Maine, California, Massachusetts and Alaska. In 1992, she served as president of the Alaska State Medical Association and was recognized as Physician of the Year.
Her free email discussion group, the Work Fitness & Disability Roundtable, has more than 1400 members and is open to any type of professional who gets involved with these issues.
She is President of Webility Corporation, a management consulting and training company. Most recently, she developed Webility’s newest offering – the non-medical Maze-Masters program which provides educational, coaching and mentoring services directly to individuals who have gotten “lost in the system” to help them get their lives back on track.
She chairs the newly-formed Praxis Partners Consortium, a by-invitation community of diverse professionals known for their commitment to producing better life outcomes for working-age people whose lives have been disrupted by illness, injury, or aging.
She previously founded and led the award-winning 60 Summits Project to promote the work disability prevention model across North America which generated 20 multi-stakeholder conferences in 14 jurisdictions. She won five awards for her efforts in this area, including the 2011 Health Achievement in Occupational Medicine Award from ACOEM, the 2009 President’s award from ACOEM, the 2008 Frances Perkins Award from the IAIABC, a 2008 Risk Innovator Award in Healthcare from Risk & Insurance, and a 2008 Responsibility Leader award from Liberty Mutual.