Rachel Patzer, PhD

03/10/2026

American Society of Nephrology Policy & Advocacy and Transplant Policy committees visit Capital Hill!

I got 30k+ steps today after visiting with 6 Senators and Representatives from Indiana and Iowa (and squeezing in a sunrise run on the Washington mall)!

We primarily discussed two big topics today:

1. Increasing NIH funding for kidney disease research - NIH only funds $19 per kidney patient in NIH research funding. We need more to prevent the disease and improve outdated technology and treatments!

2. Support for the new, bi-partisan sponsored Expanding Support for Living Donors Act, which aims to reimburse out of pocket costs for more living donors to meet the needs of these incredible humans who give the gift of life.

Of course I also had the chance to speak about some of the great research going on at the Regenstrief Institute, including work by our Transplant Research to Enhance Access team, and the importance of data, interoperability, and health data standards more broadly.

Overall, I was very encouraged by the bipartisan support we got today in all of these meetings, and am always happy to represent the American Society of Nephrology.

02/19/2026

Our Regenstrief Educational Insights and Learning series this week featured Dr. Shaun Grannis, our VP of Data and Analytics. Dr. Grannis spoke about Regenstrief’s expertise and role as a Linkage Honest Broker (LHB) - a neutral third party that links and manages disparate healthcare datasets for research while preserving the privacy of patients.

This is an important problem! Researchers (myself included!) spend a lot of time just trying to collect (or aggregate) the data they need to conduct important research. Legal agreements to share data across institutions can take many months or even years (!) and an incredible amount of administrative effort and cost, so this is a great solution that ultimately protects patients, serves researchers, and speeds up the translation of evidence into the real world.

Dr. Grannis spoke of two important contracts we have in this space, including the National Clinical Cohort Collaborative (N3C) funded by NIH and our longstanding Indiana Network for Patient Care database, which we have managed for decades to deliver research data for Hoosiers.

02/07/2026

Our Regenstrief Institute, Inc. Chief Research Officer Josh Vest talks about one of the most unique aspects of Regenstrief and the state of Indiana: our statewide data asset that includes longitudinal data from the vast majority of healthcare providers in Indiana. We are doing a lot of exciting work with clinical data, including vast amounts of clinical notes that contain rich information that researchers can use to improve healthcare.

02/02/2026

Our January newsletter was published last week! If you don’t already get these to your inbox, you can sign up at www.regenstrief.org/about-us/newsletters

This is just one example from the newsletter highlighting new research coming out of the institute: an AI-driven algorithm that uses our Indiana Network for Patient Care database and links data from mothers and their children in one dataset by connecting 82 million records from disparate sources. It has been a longstanding challenge to connect mother/child records to study important questions about pregnancy, maternal risk factors, etc and children’s health. This is tremendously helpful for researchers, clinicians, patients, and their families to now use these data for future research.

This work was published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association this month (PMID: 41093300) and supported by NIH funding.

01/08/2026

The research of Dr. Monica Williams-Farrelly of Regenstrief Institute explores how early adversity affects health and cognition later in life. Her work aims to advance detection of Alzheimer’s disease and reduce the long-term impact of early life exposures through social and behavioral interventions. https://www.regenstrief.org/person/monica-williams-farrelly/

01/02/2026

Regenstrief Institute is partnering with the City of Indianapolis and other local organizations on a first‑of‑its‑kind Indianapolis initiative providing direct cash assistance over three years to low-income expectant mothers in neighborhoods with the city’s highest infant‑mortality rates.

Regenstrief’s Jill Inderstrodt, PhD, MPH, and Katie Allen, PhD, will lead the program’s evaluation component to determine the effectiveness of the program.

The $2.3 million initiative is open to Indianapolis residents 18 or older who are up to 24 weeks pregnant, have a household income of $39,000 or less, and live in the following zip codes, which experience the highest infant mortality rates in the city: 46241, 46222, 46237, 46219, 46218, 46201, and 46235.

The BIRTH Fund (Building Independent Resilient Thriving Homes) is locally and privately funded with support from the Indianapolis Foundation, Glick Philanthropies, Herbert Simon Family Foundation, Elevance Health and other donors.

Several Marion County neighborhoods report infant mortality rates far worse than the U.S. average. A new program proposes a solution: $20,000 cash.

12/21/2025

Our Regenstrief Institute annual report is out! Check out the link in my bio for details.

This year brought unanticipated federal changes that have impacted our work: stop work orders, a government shutdown, delays in grant reviews, policy changes, and funding disruptions. While our funding for the year declined, the impact our researchers had on our community locally, nationally, and internationally, has continued.

We had more than 500 research publications among our 75 scientific investigators. In addition to original research, we published commentaries on generative AI in medical imaging, healthcare sustainability, and the infant mortality problem in Indiana, to name a few, and led conferences on healthcare AI, learning health systems, public health data modernization, and medical informatics.

We launched a new strategic plan for Regenstrief Data Services, started a new research partnership with the City of Indianapolis to help support low income Indianapolis mothers and their young children, and partnered internationally to advance interoperability and health data standardization.

Here’s to hoping the headwinds settle down in 2026 and we can focus on advancing discoveries that improve outcomes and using real world data to advance health from Indianapolis to across the globe.