Erica Spatz

Spatz was born and raised in New York where she attended Curtis High School in Staten Island. In her senior year of high school, she received a Posse nomination from the Posse Foundation to attend Vanderbilt University. She completed her Bachelor of Science degree with honors in human and organizational development from Vanderbilt in 1997 and enrolled at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev for her medical degree.[1] Spatz returned to North American following her medical degree and she finished her residency at Montefiore Medical Center and fellowship at Yale New Haven Hospital.[2]

Following her residency, Spatz was referred to the National Clinician Scholars Program (NCSP) at Yale School of Medicine, run by Harlan Krumholz.[3] During her time with NCSP, Spatz co-founded Project Access-New Haven, a health nonprofit network of physicians, hospitals and community organizations who have donated speciality healthcare to patients in New Haven.[1]

Spatz continued her research into heart attacks by tracking Medicare patients across the United States. Alongside Adam Beckman, she calculated hospitalization and mortality rates amongst those suffering heart attacks from 1999 to 2013. The results of their analysis concluded that low-income communities required targeted approaches to reduce incidents of heart attacks.[4] Continuing with this idea, she collaborated with members of the Eastern Caribbean Health Outcomes Research Network (ECHORN) Study to explain why Caribbean adult populations experience higher rates of hypertension, stroke, and heart disease.[5] In 2018, Spatz and Krumholz were co-recipients of a $1.2 million, four-year grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering to develop a wrist-worn, cuffless blood pressure monitoring system.[6] Spatz's research focus attempts to understand why a significant number of people do not take their prescribed medication, even when doing so could add years to their life. Spatz's findings highlight the little-discussed phenomena of "convenience" in the context of medical care, finding that some people would be unwilling to take a pill or even drink a cup of tea on a daily basis if prescribed by a doctor, even if doing so could add years to their life. These findings catalyze the medical community to more deeply reckon with how "convenience," "inconvenience," and what is essentially a desire not be told what to do can be major forces at play in patient compliance.[7]

In 2019, Spatz led the first study focusing on the effect motivation text messages had on providing additional support to Chinese patients with heart disease.[8] She also published a study sponsored by Women's Health Research at Yale which showed that a sex-specific classification system could define and group types of heart attacks that were more common for women.[9] During the COVID-19 pandemic in North America, Spatz's Project Access-New Haven helped launch a mHealth platform to assist low-income communities with accessing their health records and increase their participation in clinical studies.[10]

Erica Spatz publications indexed by Google Scholar