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Patrick Meyer, MD
Congratulations to Patrick Meyer, MD, a fifth-year surgical resident with VA’s Tennessee Valley Healthcare System and an MPH student at Vanderbilt University. His examination of post-surgical mortality rates among Veteran thoracic surgery patients won second place in the Best Clinical Research category from the Association of VA Surgeons (AVAS), a professional organization established in 1967 to promote education and research in VA surgery. Dr. Meyer was recognized at the AVAS Annual Meeting held in Atlanta, Georgia from April 6-8.
In “The MISSION Act and Lung Resection Outcomes: Impact of Community Care Expansion on Veteran Mortality,” Dr. Meyer compares the outcomes of more than 23,000 Veterans who had lung resections performed in either a VA or Community Care setting. Since passage of the VA MISSION Act of 2018 increased Veteran access to care outside the VA system, there has been a substantial decrease in VA-provided thoracic surgical care, and a concurrent increase in Community Care. The study, recently submitted for publication, found that the adjusted 90-day mortality rate was nearly three times higher for Veterans treated at Community Care facilities than it was for those treated at VA sites.
Dr. Meyer is in his second year of a postdoctoral research fellowship, studying under Eric Grogan, MD, and Stephen Deppen, MD, at the MASLAB, a research facility at Vanderbilt University Medical Center focused on lung tumors and early detection strategies for lung cancer. His award-winning study, part of his MPH master’s thesis, was part of an ongoing VA Merit Review Award that includes Drs. Grogan and Deppen and an analytics team led by Michael Matheny, MD. The award is supported through HSR’s VETWISE Learning Health System Center of Innovation (VETWISE-LHS-COIN), based in Nashville, Tennessee.
