Dr. Patzer is the President and CEO of the Regenstrief Institute, a health services research organization dedicated developing, conducting, and disseminating impactful research in health systems and across communities. She is also the Leonard Betley Professor of Surgery at the Indiana University School of Medicine, a Professor at the IU Fairbanks School of Public Health, and a research scientist within the William M. Tierney Center for Health Services Research within the Regenstrief Institute. Dr. Patzer’s research investigations focus on healthcare quality, health systems interventions to improve equity in access to healthcare, and health policy evaluations. She has been instrumental in reshaping the transplantation paradigm, advocating for a population health approach to inform quality measures, policies, and interventions.
Dr. Patzer led the development of a novel surveillance data registry for kidney disease, known as the Early Steps to Transplant Access Registry (E-STAR). This registry encompasses data from over 35 transplant centers nationwide covering transplant referral and evaluation processes that are not captured in national surveillance databases. Dr. Patzer and her research team has used this resource to develop quality metrics, conduct epidemiologic investigations of the factors contributing to inequities in access to kidney transplantation among patients with kidney failure, and devise pragmatic interventions that have been shown to improve access to transplantation and reduce racial disparities in transplant. Dr. Patzer is Principal Investigator of several active NIH-funded studies of multi-level (dialysis facility-, provider-, and patient-level), community-engaged interventions to help increase equity in access to kidney transplantation through pragmatic, randomized trials.