Renee Hsia, MD, MSc

Renee Y. Hsia, MD, MSc, is Professor of Emergency Medicine at UCSF. Dr. Hsia completed her undergraduate work at Princeton University from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and earned her medical degree at Harvard Medical School. She received her residency training at Stanford University and obtained a Masters of Science in health policy, planning, and financing from the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is board-certified in 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 at San Francisco General Hospital, 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 is funded by several private foundation grants, the National Institutes of Health, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation 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); how these closures affect patient outcomes, specifically focusing on patients with acute myocardial infarction, stroke, asthma/COPD, sepsis, and trauma; and the variation of costs and charges in the healthcare system. 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 Journal of the American Medical Association, Health Affairs, American Journal of Public Health, Annals of Emergency Medicine, Academic Emergency Medicine, Journal of Trauma, Archives of Internal Medicine, and Medical Care. 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 hopes that this work will help to inform policymakers on the monitoring and oversight of the equitable provision of critical services to patients across the country, and overall improvement of the system's ability to deliver healthcare.

Board Certification: Emergency Medicine