In 2000 she became director of the Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Making in the department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University, where she was also faculty in the department of Psychiatry and Teacher's College. From 2007 to 2009, she served as interim chair and vice chair of Department of BMI at Arizona State University. Patel was a professor of biomedical informatics and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston from 2009 to 2011. As of November 2011, Patel joined the New York Academy of Medicine as a senior research scientist and is the head of the Center for Cognitive Studies in Medicine and Public Health and is an adjunct professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia University in New York.
