The Levitt Center is pleased to announce that Megan Heeney, MD, has been named the Andrew Levitt Academic Resident of the Year for 2024. Megan grew up in Omaha, NE. She completed a BA at Saint Louis University and remained in St. Louis for 10 years after. Megan spent that time managing a house of hospitality for women and children, working as a community organizer, and facilitating a community behavioral health outreach team. These experiences coalesced into Megan returning to school to practice medicine, focusing on enhancing care for patients experiencing behavioral health emergencies and housing insecurity. She graduated from Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine in 2020 and completed Emergency Medicine Residency at Highland Hospital in 2024.
While in residency at Highland, Megan worked on QI projects with multidisciplinary teams in multiple areas. She worked to establish a behavioral emergency response team (BERT): facilitating simulation sessions, education sessions for providers, and interdisciplinary de-escalation training. She continues to work on a mixed-method analysis of BERT implementation. She worked with the ContraceptED team to improve reproductive health care access in the emergency department. Her research interests include improving access to care at safety net hospitals for patients who use drugs, studying outcomes of XR buprenorphrine initiation in the ED, implementation of behavioral emergency response teams, interventions to increase access to MAT, and harm reduction supports for patients presenting to care due to traumatic injuries.
Currently, Megan is in the inaugural addiction medicine fellowship at AHS Highland Hospital. She is a 2024-2026 Research in Addiction Medicine Scholar (RAMS) funded by NIDA. She continues to work clinically in the AHS emergency departments and enjoys traveling, board games, and card games.
In 2007, the Levitt family and Highland’s Emergency Medicine Department established an annual award recognizing the resident with the most outstanding research contributions, requiring first-author publication submission and active participation in the research program.
