Katherine Courtright
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Millions of Americans with serious illness live with burdensome symptoms and receive aggressive hospital care that does not match their goals. Palliative care, a supportive approach focused on maximizing quality of life, improves patient, clinical and economic outcomes.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
palliative care
serious illness
electronic health record
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Mar 2029
What they work on
- Test whether an automated needs-based palliative care trigger in the electronic health record increases hospital-free days and palliative consults compared with usual care, in a cluster-randomized trial of over 64,000 patients at 9 hospitals.
- Determine whether adding a default palliative care consult order, which clinicians can opt out of, to the needs-based trigger improves outcomes beyond the trigger alone.
- Use embedded mixed methods to measure the reach, adoption, implementation and maintenance of these interventions, and identify barriers that affect their use in other hospitals.
- Evaluate an EHR prognostic trigger combined with an active-choice alert and a default specialist consult order in a pragmatic trial of nearly 7,000 seriously ill patients across 6 hospitals.
- Assess whether patients with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias or other prespecified disease groups benefit most from systematically nudged palliative care.
More about the research
National guidelines recommend it as part of standard care. Yet many patients who could benefit never receive it, largely because busy clinicians struggle to recognize who needs it. Both projects test practical ways to build that recognition into the electronic health record (EHR). They use automated "triggers" that flag patients, combined with behavioral "nudges" that make palliative care the easier choice. Each is tested in large pragmatic trials across real hospitals.
Why it matters
Hospitalized patients with serious illnesses such as cancer and dementia often miss out on palliative care that could ease symptoms and align treatment with their wishes. These trials could show health systems which scalable EHR alerts and default orders reliably connect patients to that care. That evidence could guide how hospitals nationwide change clinician behavior and improve serious illness care.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Improving the delivery of inpatient palliative care: a hybrid type I pragmatic cluster trial
NIH · Apr 2024 – Mar 2029
Leveraging the electronic health record and behavioral nudges to promote primary and specialist palliative care for inpatients with serious illness: A pragmatic trial
NIH · Jun 2022 – May 2027
Closest labs
Jennifer Steel
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Evaluate whether CARES, an electronic health record-based screening and stepped collaborative care intervention, improves patient-centered outcomes such as health-related quality of life, in a cluster randomized trial of more than 34 outpatient oncology clinics.
Sunny Lou
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Embed S-PATH, a personalized AI model that predicts a patient's risk of needing a surgical blood transfusion, into the electronic health record as a clinical decision support tool for presurgical blood orders.
Ravi Parikh
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test in a randomized trial whether A-PACT, machine learning risk prediction paired with lay health worker phone outreach, reduces hospitalizations and intensive end-of-life care for patients with cancer.
The school
University of Pennsylvania: 90 labs on PI Pages, $2.2B a year on research, 750 research doctorates a year.
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