Emory’s departments of medicine and surgery collaborate to form Health Services Research Center 

In early Spring, Emory’s Departments of Medicine and Surgery came together to create a cooperative Health Services Research Center (HSR Center) committed to advancing healthcare access, quality of healthcare delivery, and health outcomes of patients and populations.

The center supports health services research studies that aim to enhance, improve, and revise healthcare systems so that they can perform at the highest quality and deliver the best patient outcomes. The goals of the initiative are to positively impact Emory University and Emory Healthcare’s missions, and also create a paradigm for clinical/ research institutions nationwide.  

The HSR Center is designed to deliver patient-centered outcomes through the promotion of health services research that aligns academic research with clinical care delivery. Faculty experts in three major domains of health services research are a critical component of the center and serve as mentors and advisors to trainees and junior HSR faculty. These domains, or areas of concentration, are defined as patient-level, which is concerned with disease prevention and management; micro-system level, which understands the local provision of care; and macro-system level, which focuses on the healthcare delivery system.

The center will be led by Rachel Patzer, PhD. After receiving her PhD in epidemiology at Emory, Patzer joined the Division of Transplantation of the Emory Department of Surgery with a joint appointment in the Rollins School of Public Health and an appointment in the Department of Medicine in 2011. She quickly became well recognized on the national stage of health services research, amassing a significant body of work involving her interests in disparities in 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.

To maximize its location in a multi-organizational, high achievement environment, the center will nurture 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.