Paul J. Joudrey, MD, MPH

Certified as an internist and addiction medicine specialist, Dr. Joudrey’s research focuses on identifying barriers to accessing person centered substance use disorder treatment across urban and rural communities and developing, evaluating, and scaling interventions tailored to community needs to improve treatment outcomes. He is MPI on the NIDA R01 Localize opioid use disorder (LOUD) response to increase medication access study and Co-Lead Investigator on a NIDA UG1, a pragmatic hybrid effectiveness/implementation trial of office-based methadone versus buprenorphine to address retention in treatment. Dr. Joudrey possesses methodological expertise in geospatial epidemiology, implementation science, pragmatic hybrid effectiveness-implementation trials, and community based participatory research methods. His major contributions to science include improving the measurement of community access to medications for opioid use disorder, examining how federal and state policies impact access to person-centered methadone treatment, and evaluating the effectiveness and implementation of office-based methadone in the US. His research prioritizes rural populations and building new community partnerships among people with lived and living experience of methadone treatment.

While faculty within the Yale Program in Addiction Medicine, Dr. Joudrey was a teaching attending at the Yale Primary Care Center and attending physician for the Ledge Light Health District and Alliance for Living Coordinated, Access, Resources, Engagement, and Support (CARES) program, providing mobile low-threshold buprenorphine initiation and harm reduction services. He is now an attending physician for the UPMC Internal Medicine Recovery Engagement Program (IM-REP). His teaching focuses on reducing the harms of drug use and substance use disorder treatment within outpatient and community setting. His clinical work prioritizes low barrier substance use disorder treatment and harm reduction services within outpatient and community settings.

Dr. Joudrey grew up on his family’s apple orchard and farm market near Mansfield, Ohio. He and his sister, Anne Joudrey, co-founded North Central Ohio Harm Reduction to improve the health of people who use drugs in North Central Ohio. In 2021, Dr. Joudrey and several colleagues founded the National Coalition to Liberate Methadone, a non-profit issue education organization.