Catherine Koola Fischer, MPH

Director, Patient Engagement

Following a promotion in July 2023, Cat now serves as ICER’s Director of Patient Engagement. In this role, she continues to build on strategies to strengthen the patient voice within ICER value assessments.  Her direction of ICER’s patient engagement program includes outreach and onboarding for ICER reviews, contributions to the patient perspective on ICER’s policy papers, presenting at external meetings, enhancing our resources to be more patient-friendly, and nurturing relationships with patient community partners. In addition, Cat is also a Steering Committee member of HTAi’s Patient and Citizen Involvement Interest Group (PCIG) as well as the US HTA representative for the Medical Device Innovation Consortium (MDIC)’s Health Economics Patient Value (HEPV)’s Patient Preference Research working group. Cat’s tenure at ICER began in 2019 as a Program Manager leading ICER’s independent drug reviews, followed by her transition to the Patient Engagement team in 2021 as the Associate Director of Patient Engagement.

Prior to her work at ICER, Cat served as a Product Manager at Affect Mental Health, a Boston-based start-up focused on reducing stigma around mental health disorders and identifying opportunities to improve quality of and access to care.  Previous to that, she worked as a clinical research epidemiologist at Trauma Research, LLC, where she conducted research on the clinical practices of trauma hospitals and coordinated the activities of a multidisciplinary team.

Cat has her MPH in Epidemiology from Emory University and her BS in Psychology from Texas A&M University. She now resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In her spare time, Cat moshes on Mondays: moshpitmondays.com