Renee Hsia , MD, MSc

Renee Y. Hsia, M.D., M.Sc. is Professor and Vice Chair of Health Services Research of the Department of Emergency Medicine. She is also a core faculty member of the UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies (IHPS), as well as a member of the UCSF Center for Healthcare Value and the UCSF Global Health Economics Consortium. She is board-certified by the American Board of Emergency Medicine. Dr. Hsia speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, and French, and provides emergency care to patients with a variety of backgrounds as an attending physician in the emergency department at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital & Trauma Center, the only county hospital and trauma center for San Francisco, California.

Dr. Hsia’s broad research interests are in health services issues related to increasing access to emergency care and regionalization of care. She has been funded by several private foundation grants, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, as well as the National Institutes of Health (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute), and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, to study population access to emergency departments and trauma centers in the U.S; the distribution of emergency care across income areas; factors associated with closure of emergency services (both emergency departments and trauma centers); and how these closures affect patient outcomes, specifically focusing on patients with acute myocardial infarction, stroke, asthma/COPD, sepsis, and trauma. Her research program also focuses on healthcare costs and financing issues with regard to emergency care. She is also the site PI for several multi-site studies validating trauma triage criteria for different age groups as well as their ability to predict high-risk patients. She has published on these issues in a broad range of journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Health Affairs. Her research has been widely publicized in print media, including the New York Times, the Associated Press, Reuters, USA Today, as well as national network news and radio.

Dr. Hsia received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, her medical degree from Harvard Medical School, and completed her residency training in emergency medicine at Stanford University. She obtained a Master's in Health Policy, Planning, and Financing from the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She was also named a Fulbright Scholar for her work on undocumented migrants in the European Union. Dr. Hsia is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, and is the first emergency medicine physician inducted into the American Society for Clinical Investigation.