By Merin C. MacDonald
Illuminated by a call to a career of service, Jennifer Reidy’s path as a physician-leader, educator and innovator continues to shine bright.
In this month’s Chair’s Spotlight, we feature Jennifer Reidy, MD, MS, chief of the Division of Palliative Care and associate professor of family medicine & community health. We recently spoke with Dr. Reidy about how she found her way to a career of service and the passion she brings to her roles as a physician, leader, educator, and innovator of new, transformative models of health care and medical education.
Growing up in Ohio, Jennifer Reidy did not imagine becoming a doctor. The oldest of five children, she had no physicians in her family and no specific role models in medicine. As a college student, she studied biology but worked as a writer and editor at her school newspaper. “Being in the mix, interviewing people to understand the big picture of what was happening...and analyzing some of the important events and news on campus…I fell in love with journalism and its power to illuminate and drive social change,” said Dr. Reidy. After completing her undergraduate degree, she pursued a master’s degree in journalism and began her career as a magazine writer in Cairo, Egypt, and then a newspaper reporter in Connecticut and Vermont. After 6 years, she missed having one-on-one connections and giving direct service, and she explored the idea of a career in medicine.
She obtained her medical degree at the University of Vermont and was one of the first students to complete an elective in palliative care. There she found her first mentors in palliative medicine. “Dr. Zail Barry and Barbara Segal, NP had a special magic,” said Dr. Reidy. “They could walk into a room and sit with patients and families amid tremendous suffering and listen, and then creatively solve problems to help people feel and cope better. They also supported health care providers who were struggling and mediated conflicts with grace and skill. I had never seen anything like it!”
Following medical school, she trained in family medicine at the Lawrence Family Medicine Residency within a federally qualified health center, serving an urban underserved community in Lawrence, MA. There she learned from her patients, community members, faculty, health center staff and her peers about culturally informed care, the socio-political determinants of health and social justice in health care. She saw palliative care within the continuum of caring for people and their families over the course of their lives. She had the great fortune to meet a national pioneer in palliative medicine, Dr. Charles von Gunten, at a national conference and immediately knew she wanted to train at his fellowship program in San Diego, CA. “There weren’t (still aren’t) enough palliative care doctors. My decision felt very practical as well as a true calling.” Dr. Reidy had met her husband, Dr. Philip Bolduc, in residency, and they married the day after graduation and headed out to California to start her fellowship at San Diego Hospice and Palliative Care. “I am so grateful to Dr. von Gunten, Dr. Frank Ferris, and many other faculty and colleagues who trained and mentored me. I learned not only how to practice palliative medicine with a commitment to excellence but how to teach, lead, and inspire others towards a common mission.”
Upon completing her fellowship, Dr. Reidy returned to Massachusetts with her husband and her young son, Henry, and settled near Lowell, MA. She worked as a hospice medical director at Merrimack Valley Hospice in Lawrence, practicing mostly home-based care. “My office was in my car and I would spend most days driving and visiting people wherever they lived,” including low-income apartment buildings, upscale homes, nursing facilities, homeless shelters, and assisted living facilities. “It was an honor to go where people live. It is a completely different way of practicing medicine where you are being invited into someone's home and their space. You need to acknowledge and see the expertise of the family, and with humility, bring your expertise.” Her role as director was also eye-opening. “I learned so much from social workers, chaplains, music therapists, home health aides on our interdisciplinary team about how to work as a team of equals to care most effectively for patients. It challenges the notion that doctors should know everything, do everything on their own, and be the center,” said Dr. Reidy.
Grounded in the knowledge and skills she gained from community-based care, Dr. Reidy and her family, which by then also included her young daughter, Ruby, moved to Worcester, and she began her career at UMass Chan/UMMH in 2010. “I saw this career move as a way of promoting cultural change in health care by bringing these lessons and values to trainees,” Dr. Reidy said. She started as the inpatient palliative care consultant at Memorial Hospital for a few years, and then moved to University campus in 2013 when she became co-chief of the Division of Palliative Care in the Department of Medicine with Dr. Suzana Makowski. She was later named chief in 2017. Over the years in practicing inpatient palliative care, she added outpatient work and recruited new team members to grow a 5-day per week clinic with over 600 continuity patients. “The longitudinal relationships and incremental care are vital to ‘what’s in the syringe’ of palliative care,” said Dr. Reidy. “We are helping people live as well as they can with serious, life-threatening illness, and we want to be involved as soon as possible on this road. I have patients I've known for years who are cancer survivors or live with very advanced illnesses, and we face the ups and downs with them.”
Beyond her roles as physician and division chief, Dr. Reidy is a nationally recognized educational leader and mentor. She is the founding program director for the UMass Palliative Medicine fellowship from 2020-2022 and resumed this role in February 2024. She started as director of the Junior Faculty Development Program (JFDP) in 2023 and created the new “Equip Program,” a series of advanced communication skills workshops for mid-career women faculty, during her time as the Joy McCann Professor for Women in Medicine. Dr. Reidy is grateful to work on these programs with colleagues from the Office of Faculty Affairs, including Drs. Mary Ahn, Pranoti Mandrekar, Emily Green, and Carrie Wambach. In May, Dr. Reidy was also honored with the Outstanding Mentoring to Women Award at the 2024 Women’s Faculty Committee Awards.
After 14 years at UMass, Dr. Reidy is looking towards full integration of palliative care into our health care system and medical education. She is working at the statewide level with colleagues to advocate for payment reform to build and launch 24/7 home-based palliative care and co-design this care delivery with patients, families, and members of diverse communities. She is collaborating with colleagues from digital medicine and other stakeholders to imagine and create such an infrastructure in community settings, which can help patients and families manage better at home and avoid the ED and hospital. To build the workforce to care for seriously ill patients, she has developed a portfolio of curricula across training levels at UMass Chan. This local educational effort has been fueled by her work as chair of the Massachusetts’ Medical Schools Collaborative which brings faculty, administrators, and students from Boston University, Harvard, Tufts, and UMass Chan together to ensure all students graduate with foundational training in serious illness communication. The Collaborative has developed shared competencies, curricular mapping, faculty development, and new curriculum, and last month published their results from a multicenter study on students’ perspectives of their palliative care training needs in Academic Medicine. The Collaborative’s success has propelled new and existing educational experiences within the Vista Curriculum.
“After 20 years in palliative medicine, I feel it’s a full-circle moment for me,” Dr. Reidy said. “The potential solutions to many of health care’s—and society’s—most intractable problems are found in listening and working in partnership with our patients and community members to creatively solve problems together in the real world where they live. I am grateful to all my patients, their families, my colleagues and mentors who taught me these lessons, and persist in this mindset as a leader.”
We are grateful to Dr. Reidy for her leadership and countless contributions as a physician, educator, and mentor.
Read Dr. Reidy’s article in Academic Medicine