College of Medicine

Research Area(s)

  • Innovations in Medical Education
  • Transdisciplinary Scholarship
  • Social and Organizational Change
  • Leadership Development
  • Evidence-Based Decision Making

About

Overview

Michael Epstein holds a PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management, with concentrations in Decision Science, Organizational Behavior and Information Systems.

He is a co-founder along with Joseph Schnurr MD, of the Centre for Integrative Medicine, where he has been Managing Director since 2002.

He is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology.

He has spent much of his career in interdisciplinary academic centres, including the MIT Centre for Information Systems Research (1984-1991); UBC Institute of Health Promotion Research (1994-1995); USask Centre for Integrative Medicine (2002-2022). In recent years, he has also been a frequent visitor and active online webinar participant at the UBC Centre for Health Education Scholarship.

Over the past three decades, he has worked closely with numerous senior leadership teams in the health, education, social services and high tech sectors, providing consultative assistance in strategic planning, professional development, and organizational change.

Formerly general manager and teaching professional at the Saskatoon Riverside Tennis Club, he has been coach and trainer to elite and recreational athletes. Doubled the membership from 350 members in 1976 to more than 700 members one year later.

As a badminton player, he was: twice Canadian Junior Champion; Gold Medalist Canada Winter Games; Double Gold Medalist World Maccabiah Games. He played on the Canadian Thomas Cup team against Mexico and the United States to win the North American zone.

During the period 1980 – 1984, he worked as Operations Research Analyst, Manager End User Computing, and Cost Control Director, of a $2 billion corporation.

Since 1992, Dr. Epstein has worked closely with business-, community-, and thought-leaders, politicians, philanthropists, senior health officials, researchers, medical educators, health professionals, trauma survivors and concerned citizens, to build support for lifestyle-oriented, patient-centered, cost-effective improvement, in Canadian healthcare.

 

Innovations in Change Leadership

As an MIT graduate student, he formulated an information architecture model, which was successfully adopted for integrating the payroll/personnel systems across more than 300 government agencies in the State of Massachusetts.

He has been instrumental in numerous medical curriculum change innovations at the national and local level.

He has organized and facilitated numerous public forums intended to build trust and understanding between the conventional and complementary health sectors through a process of respectful dialogue.

Along with several colleagues, he has successfully piloted several change leadership workshops involving transformative learning through dialectical inquiry and participatory educational theatre, which have been run at medical conferences in ten cities within Canada and the United States.

He successfully pioneered the use of vertical theme integration as a strategy for accelerating curriculum reform within the undergraduate medical education program.

He has devised numerous strategies for making the paradigms, principles, and practices of complementary and integrative medicine accessible to business-, community-, and thought-leaders, thereby empowering them to function as effective change agents in support of the integrative health movement.

He was instrumental in launching the Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Undergraduate Medical Education (CAMinUME) Project in Saskatoon (2003), with faculty representation from all 16 Canadian Medical Schools. He subsequently became Director of the Project for the period 2014-2016.

Over the past 20 years, he has built effective partnerships with integrative health leaders from Medicine, Rehabilitation Science, Pharmacy, Nutrition, Kinesiology, Clinical Psychology, Medical Anthropology.

 

Selected committee work

Dr. Epstein has been a reviewer with the American Journal of Health Promotion; Program Co-chair of the National Taskforce on Complementary/Alternative medicine in Undergraduate Medical Education, sponsored by Health Canada; Professional Associate in the Faculty of Social Work, University of Regina; Policy Advisor to the Collaboration for Healthcare Renewal Foundation; adjunct member of the Toronto Complementary/ Alternative Medicine Research Network; grant reviewer for the Hospital for Sick Children Foundation; and Educational Co-chair of the Complementary Care Advisory Committee, Saskatoon Health Region.

Teaching

He has taught graduate courses in research methods, multivariate statistics, and evidence-based decision making; and undergraduate courses in organizational behaviour, information technology, applied statistics, and complementary medicine.

Clinical Interests

Integrative health and medicine. Evolutionary change leadership. Organizational learning. Social entrepreneurship. Interdisciplinary scholarship. Evidence-based medicine.

Selected Publications

Selected reports and publications

He has authored commissioned reports on integrative medicine and the future of healthcare, for Health Canada, Human Resources Canada, Tsu Chi Institute for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Tamara’s House Services for Female Adult Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse.

As Educational Co-Chair of the Complementary Care Advisory Committee, Saskatoon Health Region, he authored a Handbook of Complementary Healthcare (191-pages), which was distributed to 1,500 members of the Health Region, including Senior Leadership Team, Directors, Managers, Supervisors, and Front Line Health Practitioners.

His work has appeared in Decision Sciences, Journal of Complementary and Integrative Medicine, and Canadian Family Physician.

Keynote Presentations

Michael has been a keynote speaker at several national conferences on the topic of change leadership, including the Interdisciplinary Complementary and Alternative Medicine Research Network (INCAM); Canadian Institute of Transport Engineering.

He has been a discussion panelist on CBC’s talk show The Current, and a featured speaker at the Ted-X Saskatoon event in 2015.