Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center Distinguished Lecture Series

"Trends in Lung Cancer Screening Over the Last Decade:  Eligibility, Participation, Cancer Detection and Quality Implications"

Debra Ritzwoller, Ph.D.

Senior Investigator

Economics and Cancer Research

Institute for Health Research

Kaiser Permanente Colorado

Friday, February 6th  \ Noon

ZOOM Virtual

Meeting ID: 970 5280 9554

Passcode: 658640

About Dr. Debra Ritzwoller:

Debra P. Ritzwoller, PhD, is an Economist and Senior Investigator at the Institute for Health Research. She leads a research agenda that focuses on optimizing cancer care delivery in community settings. She has more than two decades of experience conducting research on cancer related screening, diagnosis, treatment, utilization, outcomes, and costs within community-based healthcare systems. In addition, her research portfolio includes studies that examine the impact of insurance benefit design on patient cost-sharing, and cost estimation within implementation science initiatives.

As an economist and health services researcher, she has served as a Principal Investigator or Co-investigator on more than a dozen large, complex, multi-site studies. Currently, Dr. Ritzwoller is the Principal Investigator (PI), of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) funded Lung PROSPR Research Center (Lung-PRC) to improve lung cancer screening. The long-term goal of this multi-site center grant is to identify critical gaps in the lung cancer screening (LCS) process that will inform multilevel interventions to improve quality and reduce lung cancer mortality, particularly among underserved populations. She is also a PI on the recently funded NCI sponsored Cancer Screening Research Network (CSRN) that will be evaluating emerging technologies for cancer screening – including multi-cancer early detection tests. Dr. Ritzwoller is also the Site-PI for the KPCO NCI Community Oncology Program (NCORP), Cancer Care Delivery Research (CCDR) grant and previously served as a member of the NCI-CCCT CCDR Steering Committee, and co-chaired the NRG CCDR Steering Committee. She also serves as a co-Investigator on several other cancer and LCS related projects that address cancer recurrence, management of lung nodules, LCS quality metrics, and comparative modeling approaches. Additionally, she is collaborating with national leaders in implementation science and with research teams studying implementation initiatives in a variety of topical areas, including lung cancer screening, asthma care management, and behavioral economics. In response to changes in healthcare delivery that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Ritzwoller recently published several studies related to healthcare systems' transition to telehealth venues of care, and how this shift has impacted healthcare, quality, utilization and costs.