Debra P. Ritzwoller, PhD

Senior Investigator

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.

Dr. Ritzwoller earned her PhD and master's degrees in economics from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She also serves in an Adjunct Faculty Position in the Department of Health Systems, Management, and Policy at the University of Colorado School of Public Health.

Selected Research:

  • The Lung PROSPR Research Center (Lung-PRC)

    • The long-term goal of this multi-site center grant is to identify critical gaps in the lung cancer screening process and to design innovative, multilevel interventions to reduce lung cancer mortality, particularly among underserved populations.

    • Funder: National Cancer Institute
    • Award End Date: 03/31/2025

  • Improving Strategies for Cancer Reduction through Early-detection and ENgagement (I-SCREEN) A Cancer Screening Research Network (CSRN) access Hub

    • Our goal is to reduce cancer-related mortality by rapidly investigating emerging, novel screening technologies in diverse study cohorts to ensure that efficacious new technologies have broad reach to decrease, and not widen, cancer-related health disparities.

    • Funder: National Cancer Institute
    • Award End Date: 07/31/2027

  • Optimizing Lung Cancer Screening Nodule Evaluation

    • The goal of this study is to improve the performance of lung cancer screening by optimizing the management of screen-detected pulmonary nodules.

    • Funder: National Cancer Institute
    • Award End Date: 07/31/2026

  • Kaiser Permanente NCI National Community Oncology Research Program, NCORP, CCDR

    • As part of NCORPs integrated network of community organizations and research bases, the goal of the KP NCORP Community Site is to bring medical advances to our membership and the community at large by increasing clinical trial access/accrual and by conducting cancer care delivery research

    • Funder: National Cancer Institute
    • Award End Date: 07/31/2025

  • Partnering with primary care to address goals of equity, value and sustainment for primary care prevention

    • This hybrid type II implementation-effectiveness trial will test the comparative impact of the My Own Health Report health risk assessment and goal-setting intervention with two distinct implementation strategy bundles, alone or in combination, on multi-level effectiveness and implementation outcomes relevant to patients and clinics. Overall, we expect this work to narrow disparities for multiple cancer risks.

    • Funder: National Cancer Institute
    • Award End Date: 06/30/2029