Director's Profile

Rachel Patzer, PhD, MPH, is an associate professor with a joint appointment in the departments of medicine and surgery of the Emory University School of Medicine. As the director of the Emory Health Services Research (HSR) Center, a joint initiative of the Emory departments of medicine and surgery, Dr. Patzer is leading the expansion, implementation, and promotion of health services research that is designed to deliver better patient outcomes and work toward making clinical care delivery perform at the highest quality and value, not only at Emory, but as a paradigm for clinical/research institutions nationwide.

After receiving her PhD in epidemiology at Emory, Dr. Patzer joined the Division of Transplantation of the Emory Department of Surgery with a joint appointment in the Rollins School of Public Health (RSPH) and an appointment in the Department of Medicine in 2011. She quickly became recognized on the national stage of health services research, amassing a significant body of work involving her interests in improving access to transplantation, community-based participatory research, predictive analytics, health care quality, medication adherence and self-management, mobile health technology, patient education, and healthcare resource utilization.

In 2015, Dr. Patzer began directing the health services research program of the Emory Transplant Center. Her recent research projects have focused on the development of a novel surveillance data registry for kidney disease, the development of quality metrics, epidemiologic investigations of the causes of variability in access to renal transplantation among pediatric and adult end-stage renal disease patients, and the development and evaluation of pragmatic interventions to improve access to transplantation.

Dr. Patzer is also analyzing the individual, community, and health system level factors that impact post-transplant outcomes—including patient and graft survival—in both renal and liver transplantation, using predictive analytics to improve the real-time identification and management of high risk transplant recipients, and working to determine the impact of neighborhood poverty, degree of rurality, distance to health care centers, and other geospatial factors on health outcomes. The results of her work are often published in such high-profile journals as JAMA, Health Affairs, American Journal of Transplantation, and American Journal of Kidney Diseases.

While she continues to produce her own important and influential research projects, as the director of the HSR Center, Dr. Patzer is advancing health services research in the departments of surgery and medicine, as well as nurturing collaborative efforts in health services research across the Emory School of Medicine, Rollins School of Public Health, Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Grady Memorial Hospital, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the Atlanta VA Medical Center, and other related Emory departments and school areas that do similar research.