Dr. Patel earned his bachelor of science at Pennsylvania State University and received his medical degree from Jefferson Medical College, where he graduated summa cum laude and was awarded membership in Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA) and the Gold Humanism Honor Society (GHHS). He completed his internship and residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania before beginning his fellowship training at the Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases at UCLA in 2014.
During fellowship, Dr. Patel joined the UCLA Specialty Training and Advanced Research (STAR) and the NRSA (National Research Service Award) T32 Primary Care Research Fellowship programs through the Department of Medicine. This support allowed him to complete a PhD in health policy and management through the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA in 2020. His thesis focused on describing advance care planning in patients with decompensated cirrhosis at liver transplant centers. Dr. Patel also completed additional clinical training in transplant hepatology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai from 2018 to 2019. During this year, he was awarded the opportunity to serve as a visiting scholar at the Hastings Center. In 2020, Dr. Patel joined the faculty at the UCLA Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases as an assistant clinical professor of medicine.
Dr. Patel’s research focuses on describing, measuring and improving the quality of palliative care delivered to patients with serious liver-related illnesses, as well as its effect on their caregivers. He has particular interests in improving communication regarding goals of care, caregiver burden, symptom management and end of life care. In 2018, he was the recipient of the Advanced/Transplant Hepatology Fellowship Award, which provided funding for his project, “Improving Advance Care Planning in End Stage Liver Disease.”
Dr. Patel’s research has been published in a number of journals, including JAMA Internal Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, Hepatology, Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, Liver Transplantation, Clinical Liver Diseases, and Digestive Diseases and Sciences. He is an active member of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD) and the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM).
The Patel Laboratory is a health services research program focused on measuring and improving the quality of care delivered to individuals with chronic liver diseases, which include cirrhosis, hepatobiliary cancers, alcohol-associated liver disease, metabolic (dysfunction)-associated fatty liver disease and viral hepatitis.
