Recipient of the 2024 Marian W. Ropes, MD, Award: Renee Yuen-Jan Hsia, MD, MSc
The American Society for Clinical Investigation is pleased to recognize Renee Yuen-Jan Hsia, MD, MSc, as the recipient of the 2024 ASCI/Marian W. Ropes, MD, Award, for her scientific contributions to understanding the relationship between access to emergency care and disparities in the health care system. Dr. Hsia, who will be recognized at the 2024 AAP/ASCI/APSA Joint Meeting, receives an honorarium of $10,000, and delivers a scientific talk at the 2025 meeting.
Dr. Hsia’s work has elucidated how market-driven imbalances in the supply and demand of emergency care produce preventable mortality and exacerbate underlying inequities. She investigates issues relating to population access to emergency departments and trauma centers; the distribution of emergency care across income areas; factors associated with closure of emergency services; 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 health care system.
My energy, and my passion, is rooted in daily encounters with patients who cannot access the benefits of our system as easily as others, and my work is based on a conviction that systems and structures must be considered carefully with attention to both efficiency and equity.
— Dr. Hsia
In nominating Dr. Hsia, Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz wrote, “In the ten years that I have known her, I have been privileged to see how her humanity is what ultimately drives her perseverance and capacity for critical analysis, as well as her unwavering commitment to studying issues that fundamentally contribute to the structural inequity of our health care system.” Dr. Krumholz noted Dr. Hsia’s highly cited academic research, which has also gained extensive attention in popular media.
Dr. Hsia received her BA from Princeton University and MSc from the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She earned her MD at Harvard Medical School and completed an internship and residency at Stanford University. Dr. Hsia is now Professor of Emergency Medicine and Health Policy; Vice Chair of Health Services Research in the Department of Emergency Medicine, where she was hired as the first woman researcher on a research track; and a member of the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the founder and director of the UCSF Policy Lab of Acute Care and Emergencies (PLACE). As a clinician, she attends at the San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, a county hospital where most indigent patients, along with documented and undocumented immigrants, receive care and where she regularly uses her skills in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Spanish. Dr. Hsia was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2019.
