Hilja Ruegg, MD

Co-Investigator and Administrative Lead, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine

Dr Ruegg is an assistant professor with dual appointments in the Departments of Family and Community Medicine and Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience.

Her role is to guide the planning year process as part of the leadership team with a particular eye to the failure mode discovery process of collaborative work to date in the clinical sites both in the UC health system but also in the local Federally Qualified Community Health Center (FQHC) network and other non-health system Medicaid provider practices. In addition, she will provide content expertise in primary care settings.

As a dual boarded Family Physician and Psychiatrist, she serves as the Director of Integrated Mental Health Care overseeing a growing range of mental health services embedded in primary care and sub-specialty clinics across the academic health system. Using training in the Model for Improvement, she has been involved in building pilot and scaling projects for integrated models of mental health delivery. In addition, she works as a primary care physician in a local Federally Qualified Community Health Center which serves patients experiencing homelessness. In that capacity she has served as the lead physician for bringing integrated medication for opiate use disorder treatment into the primary care space and served as a consultant to help spread that model to a second local FQHC.